(Cox-Magnani) - Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture-D. S. Brewer (2015)

AND MEMORY IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE
RECONSIDERING GENDER , TIME

The training and use of memory was
crucial in medieval culture, given the
limited literacy at the time, but, to date,
very little thought has been given to the
complex and disparate ways in which
theories and practices of memory inter-
acted with the inherently unstable
concepts of time and gender prevalent
during the period. Drawing on approaches
from applied poststructural and queer
theory among others, the essays in this
volume reassess those ideologies, meanings
and responses generated by the workings
of memory within and over “time”.
Ultimately, they argue for the fundamental
instability of the traditional gender-time-
memory matrix (within which men are
configured as the recorders of “history”
and women as the repositories of a more
inchoate familial and communal
knowledge), revealing the Middle Ages as
a locus for a far more fluid concept-
ualization of gender, time and memory
than has previously been considered.
E LIZABETH C OX is Lecturer in Old English at Swansea University; R OBERTA
R
COX, MCAVOY AND MAGNANI (eds)
M AGNANI is Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Swansea University; L IZ
econsidering
H ERBERT M C AVOY is Professor of Medieval Literature at Swansea University.
CONTRIBUTORS: Anne E. Bailey, Daisy Black, Elizabeth Cox, Fiona Harris-
Gender, Time
Stoertz, Ayoush Lazikani, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Pamela E. Morgan, William
Rogers, Patricia Skinner, Victoria Turner.
and Memory in
Cover illustration: ‘Horlogue de Sapience’ (Clock of Wisdom). Henry Suso, Horlogue de
Sapience. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, MS IV.III, f. 13v. By kind permission
of Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.
Gender in the Middle Ages

Medieval Culture
Edited by Elizabeth Cox,
an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and
Liz Herbert McAvoy
668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620–2731 (US)
www.boydellandbrewer.com
and Roberta Magnani
Volume 10
Reconsidering Gender, Time and

Memory in Medieval Culture
ISSN 1742–870X
Series Editors
Jacqueline Murray
Diane Watt
Editorial Board
Clare Lees
Katherine J. Lewis
Karma Lochrie
This series investigates the representation and construction of masculinity and femininity
in the Middle Ages from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. It
aims in particular to explore the diversity of medieval genders, and such interrelated
contexts and issues as sexuality, social class, race and ethnicity, and orthodoxy and hetero-
doxy.
Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors or to the publisher,
at the addresses given below; all submissions will receive prompt and informed consid-
eration.
Professor Jacqueline Murray, College of Arts, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, N1G
2W1, Canada
Professor Diane Watt, School of English and Languages, University of Surrey, Guildford,
Surrey GU5 7XH, UK
Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK
Also in this series:

I Gender and Medieval Drama, Katie Normington, 2004
II Gender and Petty Crime in Late Medieval England, Karen Jones, 2006
III The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England, Beth Allison Barr, 2008
IV Gender, Nation and Conquest in the Works of William of Malmesbury, Kirsten A.
Fenton, 2008
V Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature, Dana M. Oswald, 2010
VI Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life, Liz Herbert McAvoy, 2011
VII Middle-Aged Women in the Middle Ages, edited by Sue Niebrzydowski, 2011
VIII Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe, edited by Cordelia
Beattie and Matthew Frank Stevens, 2013
IX Religious Men and Masculine Identity in the Middle Ages, edited by P. H. Cullum and
Katherine J. Lewis, 2013
Reconsidering Gender, Time and
Memory in Medieval Culture
Edited by
Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Roberta Magnani
D. S. BREWER
© Contributors 2015
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation

no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,
transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner
First published 2015

D. S. Brewer, Cambridge
ISBN 978 1 84384 403 7
D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA
website: www.boydellandbrewer.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library
The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy

of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate
This publication is printed on acid-free paper

CONTENTS
List of Contributors vii

Acknowledgments xi
Abbreviations xii
Introduction: In principio: The Queer Matrix of Gender, Time 1

and Memory in the Middle Ages
Liz Herbert McAvoy
1 The Pitfalls of Linear Time: Using the Medieval Female Life-Cycle 13

as an Organizing Strategy
Patricia Skinner
2 Medieval Expiration Dating? Queer Time and Spatial Dislocation 29
in Aucassin et Nicolette
Victoria Turner
3 Remembering Birth in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century 45
England
Fiona Harris-Stoertz
4 ‘Ides gnornode/geomrode giddum’: Remembering the Role of 61
a friðusibb in the Retelling of the Fight at Finnsburg in Beowulf
Elizabeth Cox
5 Remembrance and Time in the Wooing Group 79
Ayoush Lazikani
6 Gendered Strategies of Time and Memory in the Writing of Julian 95
of Norwich and the Recluse of Winchester
Liz Herbert McAvoy
7 Gendered Discourses of Time and Memory in the Cult and 111
Hagiography of William of Norwich
Anne E. Bailey
8 Re-membering Saintly Relocations: The Rewriting of Saint 127
Congar’s Life within the Gendered Context of Romance
Narratives
Pamela E. Morgan
9 A Man Out of Time: Joseph, Time and Space in the N-Town 147
Marian Plays
Daisy Black
10 Dismembering Gender and Age: Replication, Rebirth and 163
Remembering in The Phoenix
William Rogers
Bibliography 179
Index 199
CONTRIBUTORS
Anne E. Bailey completed her doctorate in July 2010 and from 2010 to
2013 held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harris Manchester College,
University of Oxford. She is currently researching and teaching at Oxford as
an affiliated member of the History Faculty. Her research interests include
saints’ cults and pilgrimage, hagiography, women’s religious history and
gender, focusing chiefly on England during the High Middle Ages.
Daisy Black is Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the

University of Hull. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Manchester
with her thesis, ‘Mind the Gap: Time, Gender and Conflict in the Late Medi-
eval Mystery Plays’. Her research interests include periodization; Cornish
religious drama; medieval depictions of Jews and Saracens; narratives of
cannibalism and their relation to the Eucharist, and examining dramatic
performance as a means of reassessing lay theologies during the early Refor-
mation. She is also currently writing a dramatization of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Elizabeth Cox was awarded her Ph.D. from Swansea University in 2013.
Her doctoral thesis was entitled ‘Discerning Women: Unravelling Enclosed
Female Identities in Secular Texts 900–1300’, in which she considered the
representations of the many ways in which women are enclosed within
male- and female-authored texts of the period. Her current research interests
include the enclosure of women in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman texts,
and the intersection of temporal, spatial, linguistic and physical borders. She
is currently teaching Old English at Swansea University.
Fiona Harris-Stoertz received her Ph.D. from the University of California

at Santa Barbara and is currently Associate Professor of Medieval History
at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. She is the author of several
articles and book chapters on gender, childbirth, childhood, and adolescence
during the High Middle Ages, and is currently working on a monograph on
high-medieval pregnancy and childbirth.
Ayoush Lazikani is currently Stipendiary Lecturer in Old and Middle English

at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the languages of affec-
tive stirrings and pain in Early Middle English, Latin and Anglo-Norman
devotional texts of the High Middle Ages. She has a forthcoming mono-
vii
Contributors
graph in this area: Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and
Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015).
Liz Herbert McAvoy is Professor of Medieval Literature at Swansea Univer-

sity. Her main research interest is medieval literature written by, for or
about women, particularly devotional texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. Interested also in issues of gender, space and enclosure, she has
published widely on medieval anchoritic writings and mystical works written
by men and women, including Authority and the Female Body in the Writings
of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (2004) and Medieval Anchoritisms:
Gender, Space and the Solitary Life (2011). She has also edited a wide range
of essay collections on these and associated topics.
Roberta Magnani is Lecturer in English Literature at Swansea University,

where she teaches medieval and early-modern literature as well as gender
theory. Interested in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and, more broadly, in the
intersection between manuscript studies and queer theory, she is currently
completing a monograph entitled Chaucer’s Queer Textualities: Manuscripts
and the Challenging of Authority for the New Middle Ages series published
by Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming in 2016). She also has research interests
in medieval medicine and gendered spaces such as the hortus conclusus.
Pamela E. Morgan has recently completed a Ph.D. at Swansea University

entitled ‘Saints and Edges in Anglo-Saxon England’. This project explores
representations of saints in Anglo-Saxon (vernacular and Latin) texts with
attention to cultural context and theories of liminality.
William Rogers is a lecturer in the English Department at Case Western

Reserve University and holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and Language
from Cornell University, where he specialized in the literature of the late
fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. His main research interests
include the history of the book, especially the transition from script to print,
queer theory and disability studies. He is currently revising his doctoral
dissertation, ‘Rewriting Old Age from Chaucer to Shakespeare: The Inven-
tion of English Senex Style’, into a book that examines depictions of old age in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and their ties to prosthesis as rhetorical
strategy and corporeal addition. Currently, he reviews Piers Plowman schol-
arship for The Year’s Work in English.
Patricia Skinner is Reader in Medieval History at Winchester University

and Wellcome Research Fellow in the History of Medicine. She is currently
working on a Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Losing Face? Living with
Disfigurement in Medieval Europe’, and is the co-editor (with Elisabeth van
Houts) of Medieval Writings on Secular Women (London, 2011). She has
viii
Contributors
published extensively in the fields of gender, Jewish and Italian medieval
history.
Victoria Turner is a Lecturer in French at the University of St Andrews.

She completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Warwick in 2013 and
is currently working on a monograph on representations of the Saracen
and notions of race and identity in medieval French literature. Her current
research interests also include the narration and translation of medieval
travel accounts and the experience of space.
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume has taken several years to produce and the editors wish first
and foremost to offer their thanks to Tom Horler-Underwood, Simon John
and their team for their hard work in organizing the Gender and Medieval
Studies group conference, ‘Gender, Time and Memory’, hosted by the Centre
for Medieval and Early Modern Research at Swansea University in January
2011. Without that conference, the twenty-second in the series, the contribu-
tors to this volume would not have come together to offer their insightful
and original reappraisals of what we currently understand about the ways
in which both time and memory were conceptualized in medieval contexts,
nor the particular influence that gender had upon such conceptualization.
Since that date, much work and rethinking have gone into the writing of
these essays, and the editors wish to offer their particular thanks to all of
the contributors to the volume who have readily complied with requests for
amendment, rewriting, additions and redaction at regular intervals during
the process. We are most grateful to them all for their cooperation and
ongoing enthusiasm for the project.
Also to be thanked is Caroline Palmer of Boydell and Brewer for her
belief in the volume’s rationale and for her patience as the project came to
its fruition. Thanks are also due to the careful and astute reader of the initial
proposal and the draft volume itself, who offered several suggestions for
development and improvement – all of which have made this a more cohe-
sive volume than it might otherwise have been. Finally, the editors would
like to offer thanks to their partners, friends and families for their continued
interest in, and support of, their academic endeavours.
xi
ABBREVIATIONS
CCCM Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (Turnhout:

Brepols, 1966–)
EETS Early English Text Society
e.s. extra series
IPM Inquisitions Post Mortem, The National Archives, Kew, UK
n.s. new series
o.s. original series
s.s. supplementary series
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
VSC Vita Sancti Cungari
Introduction
In principio: The Queer Matrix of
Gender, Time and Memory
in the Middle Ages
Liz Herbert McAvoy
Video igitur tempus quandam esse distentionem. Sed video? An videre mihi
videor?
(I see, then that time is some sort of extension. But do I see it? Do I just seem
to myself to see it?)1
Aristotle and Augustine … put us, or keep us, in mind of very long traditions
in the West of construing time in ways other than as the measurement of
discrete and identical forward-moving points on a line.2
I n her book, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the
Queerness of Time, Carolyn Dinshaw offers a protracted critique of the
modernist temporal project and its deeply heteronormative legacies. Uncov-
ering instead the myriad ways of ‘being in time’ as experienced within and
through medieval texts, in her discussion Dinshaw also reminds us what
knowledge of those multiple ‘beings in time’ is able to teach us about the
contingency of temporality within our own era. As Dinshaw rightly points
out, any close scrutiny of the ‘stories’ of the past – whether literary, historical
or those countless blurrings between the two – can deeply problematize the
notion of the ‘pastness of the past’, ultimately revealing a pastness that is, in
fact, ever present and synchronous.
The expression ‘being in time’, of course, not only signifies the different
ways in which any given human in any given cultural situation actually expe-
1 Sancti Augustini, Confessionum Libri XIII, in Opera, ed. Lucas Verheijen, Corpus
Christianorum Series Latina XXVII (Turnhout, 1981), Book XI, Chapter XXIII,
p. 209. All references will be cited as Confessions, with the translation cited by page
in parentheses. The translation is taken from The Fathers of the Church: The Confessions
of Saint Augustine, ed. and trans. Vernon J. Burke (Washington, 1966), p. 355.
2 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the
Queerness of Time (Durham, NC and London, 2012), p. 16.
1
Liz Herbert McAvoy
riences time, but also interrogates the notion of ‘time’ as a single reified
entity, with its connotations of organizing, arranging, ordering and policing
space and the operations of those who occupy it. For Dinshaw, the irreduc-
ible correlation between our notions of time and space ‘serves to emphasize
for us that time and space are inextricably linked, and that temporal disjunc-
tions implicate the disposition of bodies in space’.3 The ‘temporal disjunc-
tions’ here referred to by Dinshaw allude to a particularly modernist stance
(in her terms, the ‘modernist thicket’),4 the influence of which continues to
be felt within our own ‘now’, and which, amongst other things, posits an
acute temporal divide between the premodern and modern ‘periods’. Indeed,
even within a postmodern intellectual culture that actively endeavours to
problematize such temporal divides, time as an organizing, linear ‘progress’
from the medieval then to the here and now (with the now being infinitely
more enlightened and progressive than the then) continues to be adopted as a
means of articulating an inexorable ‘flow’ of historical activity that we are still
encouraged to remember – and re-member – in very specific ways. However,
as Dipash Chakrabarty has argued, such a linear conception of historical time
and the spaces it organizes ‘stands for a particular formation of the modern
subject’ and is, in fact, very far from being ‘natural’.5 Moreover, that ‘modern
subject’ is founded on what Kathleen Biddick has referred to in the context
of medieval studies as the ‘fathers’ work’ of the nineteenth century, within
which the subject is assumed to be inherently white, western, heterosexual,
highly educated and male – and thus the authoritative voice for articulating
the historically placed then and its relation to the now.6
Dinshaw’s work on the medieval now develops and renders relevant to
the medieval past that of Judith Halberstam, who, in her own critique of the
quasi-hegemonic status of the (hetero)normative temporal and spatial frame-
works of the modernist project within contemporary western culture, claims
that ‘white male subjects’ have long promoted a universal homogeneity of the
past. Moreover, as she also argues, such homogeneity is based on ‘a middle-
class logic of reproductive temporality’ within which the growth of the
rounded adult out of the ‘turbulence’ of childhood and adolescence provides
the ‘desired process of maturation’. In other words, the pursuit of a long and
stable, heterosexually organized life offers the most desirable vision of the
future, with alternative life-styles that pay little heed to such conceptualiza-
tions being very often pathologized, ostracized – or erased.7 For Halberstam,
3 Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, p. 12.

5 Dipash Chakrabarty, ‘The Time of History and the Times of Gods’, in The Politics of
Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, NC, 1997),
pp. 35–97 (p. 37), cited in Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? p. 19.
6 Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC and London, 1998), p. 1.
7 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
2
Introduction
too, the desirability of the stable ‘nuclear family’ is ultimately connected to a
(mythologized) national historical narrative that looks both ‘backwards’ into
time and ‘forwards’ into an imagined future in what she terms ‘hypothetical
temporality’ based on the politics of heterosexual reproduction.8 For both
Dinshaw and Halberstam, therefore, traditional notions of the historical past
are both sexed and gendered, not only in the way the evidence has been
read, interpreted and re-membered, but also in the face of evidence that has
not been read, has been misinterpreted or excluded and forgotten. Indeed,
as the essays included in this present volume cogently demonstrate, once the
pathologized, ostracized, marginalized, erased or non-human are brought
back into the frame, a decidedly untraditional, unorthodox – in Halber-
stam’s and Dinshaw’s terms, unquestionably queer – conception of time and
memory comes into focus, a queer time that chimes resonantly with our own,
should we also choose to discard the ‘time-worn’ lenses with which we look
at ourselves and our own cultures. In the words of E. Line MacCallum and
Mikko Tuhkanen: ‘Living on the margins of social intelligibility alters one’s
pace; one’s tempo becomes at best contrapuntal, syncopated, and at worst,
erratic, arrested.’9
Also highly critical of western culture’s inherently sexed and gendered
conception of linear time and historical ‘progress’ is Luce Irigaray, who
posits that men’s (and therefore the dominant culture’s) relation to time and
memory in the West has long been dependent upon the patriarchal subju-
gation of women, whose life-cycles and temporal daily rhythms have tradi-
tionally differed from those of men.10 For Irigaray, the specificities of female
bodily experiences of, for example, the onset of the menses, repeated child-
bearing, menopause – or even elected virginity – and work within the home
have long occupied the realm of the pathologized, ostracized and erased,
mentioned above. As such, they have found no place in the notion of the
universal, having been overwritten by a male model of temporality based on
the rigid linear logic of a past-present-future that ensures ‘his’ own genealogy,
with woman as the vessel (in Irigaray’s terms, the ‘envelope’) that facilitates
that ‘progress’. For Irigaray, therefore, women have traditionally provided
the spatial dimension which male temporality must organize for purposes
of cultural and personal stability and futurity. In effect, for Irigaray, such a
process is part of ‘the endless construction of a number of substitutes for his
prenatal home’ (the primary ‘enveloping body’ of the mother), from which
(New York and London, 2005), p. 5.

8 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, p. 5.
9 E. L. MacCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, Queer Times, Queer Becomings (New York,
2011), p. 1.
10 Irigaray addresses this issue in a number of her writings, but see, for example, An
Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London and New
York, 2004), especially ‘Sexual Difference’, pp. 7–19.
3
Liz Herbert McAvoy
he must separate for his own survival. As compensation for this primary
separation, a man must subsume into his own linearity the woman’s life-cycle
and life-rhythms and claim them as his own; he ‘contains or envelop[s] her
with walls while enveloping himself and his things with her flesh’.11 Thus the
heterosexual matrix, as identified also by Dinshaw and Halberstam, upon
which traditional notions of time are predicated, is kept intact. Ultimately
for Irigaray, not unless women (and, by implication, other marginalized or
erased subjects) can find themselves ‘through the images … already depos-
ited in history … and not on the basis of his work, his genealogy’,12 will an
understanding of full individual subjectivity be achievable.
Irigaray’s exposition, of course, remains rooted in the intrinsic value of a
sexual difference that utterly resists the universalizing processes of patriar-
chal masculinity, whereas Halberstam and Dinshaw, following Judith Butler,
uncover the inherent performativity of any sex/binary gender position – and
thus the discursive performativity of accepted positions on (gendered) time
and space. Dinshaw, in particular, unearths the Middle Ages as a site of the
multiple and the queer which serves to disrupt temporal and spatial stereo-
types and uncovers the disruptive presence of ‘a more heterogeneous’ now
that knows no temporal boundaries, as such.13
In spite of the tendency of modern western culture to distance itself from
a homogeneous and unenlightened then of the medieval ‘past’, it becomes
clear from the essays collected in this volume that medieval culture was far
less caught up in this type of hegemony than has commonly been assumed,
embracing – often without comment or question – the type of queer multi-
plicities, both human and non-human, identified by Dinshaw: indeed, what
Michel Foucault would call ‘heterochronies’ and ‘heterotopias’.14 Offering a
glimpse at time, not as a process that generates an ‘ever-accumulating past’,
but as a configuration of ‘a network that connects points and intersects with
its own skein’, Foucault reconnects the spaces of our everyday lives with the
sacred, the fantasmatic and the passions, all of which imbricate the physical
places that we occupy in the construction of discrete, although simultane-
ously experienced spaces. For Foucault, therefore, the spaces of our everyday
lives are thoroughly heterogeneous with meanings that are irreducible to indi-
vidual entities. In fact (and this is also argued by Dinshaw in the context of
the medieval), the very multiplicity of these everyday spaces is most apparent
11 Irigaray, Ethics, p. 12.

14 According to Foucault, a heterotopia (such as the cemetery, for example) is a space
that has multiple layers and meanings – and ones that are not immediately obvious
to the beholder. Very often, too, heterotopic spaces conjure up and interact with
multiple temporalities, in Foucault’s terms, ‘heterochronies’. See Michel Foucault, ‘Of
Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16.1 (1986), 22–7 (22); first published as ‘Des Espaces Autres’,
Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984), 46–9.
4
Introduction
when linear time is disrupted or temporarily abandoned: here, the ‘slices in
time’ that are opened up by such a disruption can be termed ‘heterochro-
nies’, a set of temporal schema within which time operates in multiple ways
simultaneously. Thus, as Dinshaw asserts, ‘there are many possible times in
the now’.15
With the queerness of time clearly in mind, the essays in this present
volume all concern themselves in a variety of ways with the many possible
times in the now of what we have come to refer to as the Middle Ages.
Indeed, as the contributors make clear, heterochrony was something that
clearly preoccupied the medieval mind, whatever the gender, status, educa-
tion or life stage of the thinking subject. The Christian belief-system, of
course, firmly rested on a biblical time that ranged from the atemporality
of Eden and the Fall to the second coming of Christ and humanity’s ulti-
mate return to paradisiacal eternity. On the other hand, the faithful were
also caught up in the demands of the here-and-now of a whole range of
temporal cycles – be they corporeal, seasonal, devotional, familial or voca-
tional – something that Patricia Skinner posits in the initial essay to this
volume. Any given day could be temporally structured, for example, by a
variety of simultaneous chronologies: the varying length of daylight hours;
the need to begin ploughing or harvesting; devotion to a range of patron
saints and other constraints and celebrations of the Church calendar; preg-
nancy or lying-in or purification; the saying of prayers for the dead; or, in the
early period, oral histories and feasting – none of which, upon close scrutiny,
necessarily depended upon or served to reinforce cultural and gender norms,
as has often been assumed. Clearly, the inherent queerness of time was a
commonplace for the medieval subject and something to be negotiated on a
daily basis. Such multiple temporal rhythms and experiences, as Skinner also
argues in the context of female life-cycles, need to be heavily foregrounded in
any historical appraisal or analysis, so as not to continue the long-established
processes of erasure, occlusion or myth-making.
Formal medieval scholastic and ecclesiastical debates on time were driven
by Saint Augustine, who, in his Confessions, grappled with the slippery concept
of temporality, asking famously, ‘Quid est enim tempus? Quis hoc facile
breviterque explicaverit?’ (For what is time? Who can explain it easily and
briefly?).16 For Augustine, following the neo-Platonic concern, time on earth
is God given, part of the complex divine plan and bounded by eternity. Whilst
Eden, however, was in its original state atemporal, the ultimate legacy of the
Fall was exile from the bliss of eternity into the harsh world of the temporal.
Augustine thus perceives human time as constituting a continuous sequence
of present moments, with time-past forced perpetually to recede because of

16 Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, Ch. XIV, p. 202 (p. 343).
5
Liz Herbert McAvoy
the approach of the oncoming future as humanity marches inexorably from
Eden towards the Last Things, Judgment and, ultimately, salvation. Neverthe-
less, for Augustine, the now of the present is informed, coloured and antici-
pated by both past and future and is ultimately inseparable from them. Time
is therefore paradoxically and perplexingly self-negating: if the past is past
and the future not yet arrived, can either be said to ‘exist’ at all? And, if that is
the case, can time-present even be thought of as ‘time’ at all? Such questions
infuse the Confessions with ambivalence about the possibility of a monolithic
temporality which, so Augustine suggests, merely provides us with a type of
rhetorical shorthand for ontological questions that are highly complex: ‘Quis
hoc ad verbum de illo proferendum vel cogitatione comprehenderit?’ (Who
can grasp this, even in cogitation so as to offer a verbal explanation of it?),
he asks. Yet, as Augustine also points out: ‘Quid autem familiarius et notius
in loquendo commemoramus quam tempus? Et intellegimus utique, cum id
loquimur, intellegimus etiam, cum alio loquente id audimus’ (Yet, what do
we mention, in speaking, more familiarly and knowingly than time? And
we certainly understand it when we talk about it; we even understand it
when we hear another person speaking about it).17 For Augustine, therefore,
time, whilst experienced personally and subjectively by individuals as a thing,
is also inherently heterosynchronous and therefore eminently suitable for
consolidation into a type of discursive cultural consensus or commonplace.
As such (if we take into account Irigaray’s notion of temporal appropriation),
it can be argued that ‘time’ also forms a linguistic shorthand that forges often
arbitrary commonalities between people’s ‘memories’ of the past in ways that
are highly contingent, overriding issues of class, status, socio-cultural context
and, above all, gender in the service of the contingent.
In Book XI of his Confessions, Augustine also ponders the role of memory
in the construction of time, acknowledging the crucial co-dependence of the
two and claiming ultimately that the past can be said to ‘exist’ only through
the workings of memory. Indeed, for Augustine:
Et quis negat praeterita iam non esse? Sed tamen adhuc est in animo memoria
praeteritorum. Et quis negat praesens tempus carere spatio, quia in puncto
praeterit? Sed tamen perdurat attentio, per quam pergat abesse quod aderit.
Non igitur longum tempus futurum, quod non est, sed longum futurum longa
expectatio futuri est, neque longum praeteritum tempus, quod non est, sed
longum praeteritum longa memoria praeteriti est.
(Who denies that past things are already non-existent? Yet, there is still in
mind the memory of things past. Who denies that present time lacks extent,
for it passes away in an instant, like a point? Yet, attention lasts on, and,
through it, what will be continues to go on into that which is no longer here.
So, the non-existent future is not a long time, but a long future period is a
17 Augustine, Confessions, Book IX, Ch. XIV, p. 202 (p. 343).
6
Introduction
long expectation of the future; nor is past time long for it is non-existent, but
a long past is a long memory of that which is past.)18
Here Augustine configures both present and future as mediated by the

melding of time, memory and anticipation, a mediation which forms for the
medieval mind what Mary Carruthers has termed ‘the matrix of all human
perception’.19 Crucially, as Carruthers makes clear, for the medieval mind, the
past is not any concrete ‘thing’, since it has already faded into non-existence,
but it is a ‘representation’ made via its traces stored in the memory.20 Memory,
therefore, as conceived of by Augustine, differed from our own twenty-first-
century perspective in that it formed a praxis rather than a doxis, accruing
a wide range of values, practices and purposes over time and in conjunc-
tion with time. As praxis, too, it operated as a historico-cultural ‘value’ or
‘modality’,21 was therefore expedient and, as the essays collected here reveal,
found its way into the literary contexts of the Middle Ages in a myriad of
manifestations.
As suggested at the beginning of this introduction, the melding of time
and memory into reified entity within a deeply gendered modernist project
has helped to forge the cultural currency called ‘history’, which, in Katherine
Biddick’s words, ‘reterritorializes [memory] as archive’ or as ‘institutional
discipline’.22 Yet, as Liedeke Plate reminds us in her book on contemporary
women’s rewriting of the master narratives of history, ‘[M]emory provides
the knowledge from which we derive identity, both at the individual and the
collective level.’23 For Plate:
Time passing, indeed, shows the precariousness of the past as held in indi-
vidual memory, proving the need to remember collectively, if one wants not
to forget. Cultural memory, then, is this collective act of remembrance that
negotiates between history and memory, locating itself at their intersection,
attempting to formulate a public discourse that can stand in for the fragility
of the individual memory, its unreliability and ephemerality.
This present volume, therefore, also aims to reveal the ‘precariousness’ of our
visions of the past and challenge the absolute homogeneity of identities as
generated alchemically through the interplay of gender, time and memory.
In order to do so, whilst frequently drawing on established scholarly studies
of time and memory in the Middle Ages (such as Carruthers’ comprehen-
18 Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, Ch. XXVIII, pp. 213–14 (p. 362).
19 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
(Cambridge, 2008), p. 238.
20 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 239.
22 Biddick, Shock of Medievalism, p. 167.
23 Liedeke Plate, Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (New York,
2011), p. 9.
7
Liz Herbert McAvoy
sive treatment cited above, and, more recently, the work of Elisabeth van
Houts),24 by adding the concept of the fluidity of gender to the mix, it will
forge new paths and responses to more postmodern readings of the gender-
time-memory matrix as manifested in the medieval texts and sources under
scrutiny. Such re-readings and re-memberings of a range of medieval texts,
written in Old English, early and late Middle English, Old French and Latin,
reveal the inherent instability of a coherent linear temporality or monolithic
cultural memory that coalesce into instantly predictable and recognizable
identities and relationships. Indeed, if we turn again to Dinshaw’s configura-
tion of the medieval past with which I began this introduction, the subjects
focused on in these essays demonstrate the extent to which consciousness of
individually experienced memory and temporality is embedded in personal
responses to events, relationships and environment, however much these may
be organized by a historically expedient ‘smooth, sequential measurement’.25
In Irigaray’s terms, the admission of multiple memories and temporali-
ties ‘constitute[s] a possible place for each sex … disconcerting the mirror
symmetry that annihilates the difference of identity’.26 Such ‘possible places’
are frequently to be glimpsed at in the essays that follow.
In an attempt to reflect the types of multiple memories and temporalities
mentioned above, and the ways in which they are appropriated by, or interact
with more linear and communal configurations, the essays are ordered in
terms of life-cycle, rather than chronologically – or by gender. It is hoped that
such a structure, albeit another arbitrary one, will allow for further uncov-
ering of the fluid experience and ownership of time and memorial practices
in the contexts under scrutiny in each case. As mentioned above, the first
essay, by Patricia Skinner, which sets the tone for such a structure, bases its
premises on the author’s recent experience of co-editing with Elisabeth van
Houts a volume of translated sources pertaining to medieval women’s secular
lives, a volume whose purpose was ultimately to expand upon the insights
gleaned from Elizabeth Spearing’s 2003 anthology of medieval writings
on female spirituality.27 Aiming at challenging deeply entrenched concep-
24 For Carruthers’ work, see n. 19 above. See also Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and
Gender in Medieval Europe: 900–1200 (Toronto, 1999). Also important is Janet
Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past
(Cambridge, 1992). For a study of the workings of time and memory within a range
of different European contexts, from manuscript studies and the literary to the art
historical, see The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages, ed. Lucie Doležalova (Leiden,
2009). See also Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at
the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1994); and Medieval Memory: Image
and Text, ed. Frank Willaert, Herman Braet, Thom Mertens and Theo Venckeleer
(Turnhout, 2004).
27 Patricia Skinner and Elisabeth van Houts (eds), Medieval Writings on Secular Women
8
Introduction
tions of ‘the ages of man’ as the type of primary, universalist paradigm I
addressed above, Skinner argues that the use of a gendered life-cycle as a lens
for reading the complexities of the past can be a productive and nuanced
methodology, although, of course, not without its own problems. Indeed,
according to Skinner, medieval sources tend to deal not with the mundane
but with the unusual and, very often, the dysfunctional; but it is the very
slippage between the expected and the unexpected, the orthodox and the
heterodox, that suggests to Skinner that there is a fundamentally important
contrast between the ways in which men relate to their own life experience
and those of women – although both have regularly been subsumed into
concepts of ‘the medieval world’ or ‘medieval people’. Indeed, Skinner’s essay
concludes with the observation that men and women’s lives certainly ‘played
out to different rhythms’, with the recording of men’s achievements – what
they did – offering an illusion of unbroken linearity, whereas women’s own
‘progression’ was likely interrupted or rendered cyclical, and thus ‘slower’
by interventions such as serial marriage, childbirth etc. As such, so posits
Skinner, it is possible that these different life-rhythms allowed for the storing
of memories often overlooked by their men and by the grand historical
narrative.
The second essay in the volume takes up a number of issues raised by
Skinner, albeit in the context of the thirteenth-century chantefable written
in Old French, Aucassin et Nicolette. Here, Victoria Turner suggests that the
star-crossed eponymous lovers of the tale, and their determination to pursue
a shared destiny in the face of racial and class difference and parental opposi-
tion, embrace a live-now-rather-than-later resistance to the heteronormative
bonds of futurity via a set of gender transgressions that render their passion
and identities decidedly queer. Indeed, their youthful love-at-all-costs, in
Turner’s estimation, brings about a suspension of heteronormative tempo-
rality whilst the two protagonists learn through multigendered physical and
emotional peregrinations that a future in which desire may be permanently
fulfilled can be achieved only by embracing the queer.
The suspending of linear time in childbirth and its re-incorporation into
history via the melding of gendered memories is the subject of Fiona Harris-
Stoertz’s essay. Like Turner, Harris-Stoertz identifies the specificity of female
memories of childbirth, from which event men were more often than not
excluded. That being said, Harris-Stoertz makes the important point that
men were nevertheless ‘part of the rich tapestry’ surrounding birth in late-
thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century England, with their accounts and
memories of those births being clearly recounted in the ‘proofs of age’ that
formed part of the Inquisitions Post Mortem. The crucial issue here, however,
(London, 2011); and Elizabeth Spearing (ed.), Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality
(Harmondsworth, 2003).
9
Liz Herbert McAvoy
is that, whilst women themselves were barred from presenting evidence in
‘proofs of age’ cases, the male-witness accounts are clearly imbricated with
the stories of the women, stories which drew on female life-cycle memo-
ries that helped to shape the collective oral and written remembering of the
community.
The uncovering of otherwise unrecorded female stories from the grand
narrative of male-authored history is the project of Elizabeth Cox in her essay
on the queenly friðusibb or ‘peaceweaver’ in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf.
As Cox points out at the beginning of her essay, the poem is fundamentally
about memory and the ways in which gendered memory shapes cultural
conceptions of past, present and future. Cox takes as her focus three of the
Beowulf queens, Wealhtheow, Hildeburh and Thryth, and, drawing upon the
theories of Irigaray regarding the patriarchal exchange of women, demon-
strates how layers of hidden and appropriated subjectivities emerge from
the narrative accounts of these queens, freeing them momentarily from the
ideological enclosure of their peace-weaving role and highlighting its futility.
By ‘remembering’ and ‘re-membering’ the queens and the failed ‘use-value’
as friðusibb within their male-dominated warmongering societies, the poet,
according to Cox, forges a creative act of memory transmission that is used,
amongst other things, to point out the anachrony of the old ways and point
towards a new becoming more in tune with an increasingly Christianized
society.
Ayoush Lazikani and Liz Herbert McAvoy both turn to the experi-
ence of the enclosed religious woman in their essays, examining how a
woman’s voluntary removal from sociality and her exclusion from hetero-
sexual temporality may have impacted upon those works written for and
by her. Focusing primarily upon Ancrene Wisse and Wooing Group texts,
dating from the thirteenth century and written for an audience of female
anchorites, Lazikani explores the full implications of the term munegunge
in these texts. A gerund originating in Old English, the term signifies an
act – action even – of re-forming Christ through re-membering as part of
the daily praxis of the female anchorite. Such re-forming and re-membering
enables the holy woman to pursue Christ’s physically re-imagined body and
allows her personal and intimate access to it. Such a praxis, moreover, liber-
ates the anchoress from the constraints of a chronologically orthodox, and
thus communal, Passion narrative to enable her to engage freely with Christ
as her ‘living’ spouse at will. As such, she is able to occupy with her lover
the same queer and heterochronic temporality of the now as we encountered
earlier in the case of Aucassin and Nicolette.
Lazikani’s essay is followed by McAvoy’s, which also focuses on anchoritic
writing – in this case works known to have been written by the enclosed
women themselves. Concentrating on the writing of Julian of Norwich and
an anonymous Winchester recluse, McAvoy makes concerted use of Irigaray
to explore what happens when women resist the role imposed upon them
10
Introduction
to support men’s conceptions of their own dominant position in linear time
and space (in Irigaray’s terms, their espacement). Having withdrawn from
the world into anchoritic isolation, Julian of Norwich and others like her
(including the initial audience of Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group) expe-
rience distinctly asynchronous temporalities, not only through life-threat-
ening illness (as in the case of Julian) but also through visionary experience
and – crucially – perpetual re-membering of those asynchronies via the
written text. As such, as McAvoy argues, both writers are able to insist upon
a personal espacement that bleeds into that of an ‘other’ time and an ‘other’
place, offering them a subjectivity that is not dependent upon inherited male-
constructed paradigms.
The construction of male sanctity through gendered time and memory
is of concern to Anne E. Bailey in her essay on two representations of the
child-saint, William of Norwich, as he appears in a hagiography written by
William of Monmouth not long after the child’s death. Recognizing the hagi-
ographer’s difficulties in constructing a suitably saintly persona in the face of
the conflicting evidence of still-living eye-witnesses, Bailey suggests that, in
William’s vita, the different ways in which women and men remember – and
re-member – are evident upon examination. Like several other contributors,
Harris-Stoertz in particular, she recognizes the traces of a specifically femi-
nine discourse of time and memory layered beneath an official ‘masculine’
record of events. Furthermore, that feminine discourse is deployed by the
author as a narrative device that facilitates the awkward spatial and temporal
transition between the worldly and the saintly now that the child William
had to negotiate in this literary treatment.
Pamela E. Morgan continues the theme of multiple male religious subjec-
tivities in an essay focusing on the much-overlooked Anglo-Saxon Saint
Congar. Similar textual disparities reveal the queering of generic boundaries
in the twelfth-century hagiography written to commemorate Congar’s life as
lived in the sixth century. As Morgan points out, the twelfth-century dating of
the text places it always already in a liminal or queer space: between Anglo-
Saxon and Norman temporalities, and between traditional hagiography and
secular romance. For Morgan, the queer liminality of the text is crucial for
the refashioning of memories and idea of an Anglo-Saxon England within
an Anglo-Norman context and for the exploration of changing masculini-
ties over time – and the operations of those masculinities within shifting
temporal and spatial contexts.
Changing masculinity as a means of representing the imbrication of the
‘old law’ within the new is also something of concern to Daisy Black in her
essay focusing on the N-Town play Joseph’s Doubt. In this essay, she picks
up on the debate articulated elsewhere in this volume regarding the different
temporal rhythms experienced by men and women in the Middle Ages,
suggesting that one reading of the play points towards Mary’s pregnancy as
consolidating the ‘new’ law, whilst Joseph’s doubt about her claims of divine
11
Liz Herbert McAvoy
intervention pose the first challenge to this law. However, Black’s reading is
also more nuanced than this might suggest. She argues that Mary and Joseph
initially share not only an orthodox (‘Hebrew’) temporality at the start of
this play but also a heterodox temporality in their attempt to deny a hetero-
sexually based and procreative linearity by insisting upon a chaste marriage
(which, of course, denies the concept of any futurity in Dinshaw’s sense). It
is upon the Incarnation that the cracks within the espacement of the couple
begin to open up and their responses to time and memory begin to differ.
Such differing responses thus provide ways of reading and understanding
Mary’s ‘baffling pregnancy’, but also resonate more conceptually with the
arguments first posited by Skinner in the opening chapter to this volume.
The final essay in this collection returns to the Anglo-Saxon period and –
appropriately – takes things in a somewhat different direction in its appraisal
of the subject of death and regeneration as embodied, not by a human figure,
but by the mythic, and queer, figure of the phoenix. Taking as his focus the
Old English poem of the same name, William Rogers nevertheless draws
upon a theme that has emerged in a good number of those essays preceding
his: ‘the often spectral presence of women in the poetic, legal and social
record’. Here, in his examination of the poem, he finds the haunting pres-
ence of femininity queering the poetic reworking of this bird, presenting a
heterodox view of time and the ageing process that ultimately dis-members
and de-genders a queer creature destined forever to self-generate and self-
reproduce. In many ways, Rogers’ essay provides a response to the assertion
of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in his Medieval Identity Machines that the subversive
potential of the queer should not be restricted to the human form. Indeed,
for Cohen, the anthropocentric bias of recent queer methodologies serves
only to continue the process of oversight and exclusion mentioned at the
start of this introduction, and, in the context of this present volume, fails to
acknowledge that the non-human, too, is equally subject to the restraining
mechanisms of constructed time and memory.28 As such, for Rogers, the
phoenix embodies both synchronous and asynchronous time in a palimpsest
of the now and then that perfectly encapsulates the temporal queerness iden-
tified by Dinshaw in her book when she states: ‘“Now” cannot specify a
determinate moment after all.’29 The phoenix, then, is also an apt figure with
which to end this present volume.
28 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis, MN, 2003), p. 40.
12
1
The Pitfalls of Linear Time: Using the

Medieval Female Life-Cycle as an
Organizing Strategy
Patricia Skinner
B ased on the experiences I have shared with Elisabeth van Houts in

compiling a recently published book of translated sources for secular
women’s lives from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries,1 this chapter exam-
ines the applicability of life-cycle as a structuring tool in the study of women’s
lives in the past. Taking as its starting point what commentators such as
Carolyn Dinshaw have identified as masculinist conceptions of linear time,
as expressed in such schemata as ‘the ages of man’,2 it will argue that the
apparent order and linearity of a lifetime, and its expectation of smooth
progress from one life stage to the next, is an illusory ideal, interrupted and
disrupted by actual life events. Moreover, certain life events, such as giving
birth and mourning, might actually remove a woman from the linear flow of
time within her community, as she withdrew from the everyday to observe
ritual obligations or vigils. And, if she returned to her normal life afterwards,
it might be with the aim of repeating a particular life stage, rather than
‘progressing’ forward through her life. Therefore, as I shall suggest, such a
cyclical experience of time may well have produced – and stored for posterity
– different types of memories from those available to the women’s menfolk.
1 Patricia Skinner and Elisabeth van Houts (eds), Medieval Writings on Secular Women
(London, 2011). The volume was designed as the counterpart to Elizabeth Spearing
(ed.), Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality (Harmondsworth, 2003). Numerous
other sourcebooks have appeared since the 1990s, including Alcuin Blamires (ed.),
Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford,
1992); Emilie Amt (ed.), Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London,
1993); P. J. P. Goldberg, Women in England, c. 1275–1525: Documentary Sources
(Manchester, 1995). And see below, note 25. None of these, however, used the life-
cycle as an organizing principle.
2 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the
Queerness of Time (Durham, NC and London, 2012), as discussed by Liz Herbert
McAvoy in the Introduction to this present volume.
13
Patricia Skinner
Collecting sources about secular women enabled an overview of how such
processes might work in practice.
It is fair to say there has been a significant dropping-off of publication of
sourcebooks about medieval women in the new millennium: is the market
saturated, or does this reflect the massive increase in and uptake of material
from internet resources?3 Has the project of documenting medieval women,
the starting point in the wider drive to make medieval studies more inclusive,
run its natural course? Or might the reluctance to create more source collec-
tions acknowledge the difficulty in representing women’s lives, given that
previous volumes have rather arbitrarily organized their materials according
to preconceived modern notions of medieval women’s communities (thus
grouping by social rank) or activities (thus grouping ‘working women’
without really interrogating the term ‘work’)? As early as 1993 Judith Bennett
commented along much the same lines, and pointed out that feminism had
yet to be integrated into medieval curricula and research frameworks.4 Such
volumes as had already appeared did so with sections containing sources
which do not fit the categories applied, under the headings ‘minority’ or
‘marginalized’ women, often shorthand for ‘non-Christian’, or for women
whose sexuality and sexual activity left question marks, or simply for women
whose status cannot be fully determined from the source. By whom were
these women really marginalized?5
It seemed, then, that a new approach was needed to secular women’s
lives, one which did away with these preconceived categories and instead
approached women through their life stages. This was heavily influenced
by Deborah Youngs’s work on the late-medieval life-cycle which, when the
source-book was in preparation, had just been published.6 This choice of
structure (so we thought) had rather less to do with traditional life-cycle
3 Chief amongst these is the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, with its section on Sex
and Gender, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1v.html (accessed 28 November
2010). A similar resource is the Labyrinth, http://labyrinth.georgetown.edu/display.
cfm?Action=View&Category=Women (accessed 28 November 2010), and resources
are also linked from sites such as Feminae: The Medieval Women and Gender Index,
hosted at Iowa, http://inpress.lib.uiowa.edu/feminae/OtherResources.aspx (accessed 28
November 2010). Publishers are also increasingly making sources available in digital
as well as paper form: see the section on women in Manchester University Press’s
Medieval Sources Online, http://www.medievalsources.co.uk/portal_women.htm
(accessed 28 November 2010).
4 Judith Bennett, ‘Medievalism and Feminism’, in Studying Medieval Women: Sex,
Gender, Feminism, ed. Nancy Partner (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 7–29 (pp. 25–6).
5 ‘Marginal’ women even had their own book of essays: Robert Edwards and Vickie
Ziegler (eds), Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society (Woodbridge, 1996).
The comment might also be made that regional boundaries also shape such works:
few English-language sourcebooks, for example, include anything more than token
examples from the Byzantine and Islamic worlds.
6 Deborah Youngs, The Life Cycle in Western Europe, c. 1300–1500 (Manchester, 2006).
14
The Pitfalls of Linear Time
models envisaged by medieval studies of the ‘Ages of Man’ – these, after
all, provided what Dinshaw terms ‘a mechanistic and constricting linearity’,7
universally gendered male – and, despite the best efforts of recent work to
argue that women, too, enjoyed such life stages as ‘youth’, we found such
schemata to be a poor fit.8 Instead, our approach meant that we juxtaposed
women of all classes, religions and occupations across our entire period,
dividing the book up by the stage of their lives they had reached: ‘Birth and
Infancy’, ‘Girls and Young Women’, ‘Married Women and Mothers’, ‘Widows,
Older Women and Death’.
But was such a structure as unproblematic as it appeared? The key point
about medieval sources, perhaps even their distinguishing feature, is that
they were not as a general rule interested in documenting the everyday and
mundane, but are peppered with the unusual, the alternative and the down-
right dysfunctional. Indeed, it is these points of disruption and interruption
in women’s lives that suggest a more deep-seated contrast between their life
experiences and those of men. To give some examples: a girl’s birth might
not be a cause for universal celebration;9 marriage might be delayed in order
to assemble the necessary resources for a new household; a woman might
never marry; for single women, unplanned pregnancy might destroy their
chances of a respectable marriage (fallen women were a favourite source
for satirical poems).10 Conversely, for married women, the expected children
might not come; the marriage might break down or even end in divorce,11 or

8 Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Interpretations of the Life-Cycle (Princeton, NJ,
1986); John A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought
(Oxford, 1986); Ivan Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to
Modern Times (Seattle, 2004); Katherine Lewis, Noel James Menuge and Kim Phillips
(eds), Young Medieval Women (Basingstoke, 1999); Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens:
Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester, 2003).
9 For example, Skinner and van Houts, Medieval Writings on Secular Women, text
13, p. 32, reproduced from Shlomo D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish
Communities of the World as Portrayed in the Cairo Genizah, vol III: The Family
(Berkeley, CA, 1978), p. 228.
10 See, for example, Skinner and van Houts, Medieval Writings on Secular Women, text 45,
pp. 102–4, newly translated from ‘The Maid Forlorn’, in The Oxford Book of Medieval
Latin Verse, ed. Stephen Gaselee (Oxford, 1928, repr. 1937).
11 See, for example, Skinner and van Houts, Medieval Writings on Secular Women, texts
78, 80 and 81, pp. 167–75, documenting an unhappy wife committing suicide, a wife
repudiated on grounds of consanguinity and a divorce apparently initiated on grounds
of the wife’s failure to produce children. The status of a separation or divorce, of course,
depended upon the status of the original marriage: whilst the Church endeavoured to
ensure that marriages be public, consensual, monogamous, preferably celebrated by
a priest and indissoluble, few lived up to these conditions in the early Middle Ages.
As marriage became more defined, however, so the conditions for separation became
harder to meet: see the useful discussion in Sara Butler, Divorce in Medieval England:
From One to Two Persons in Law (New York and Abingdon, 2013), pp. 1–10, 15–16. The
15
Patricia Skinner
be terminated early by widowhood. A woman might then marry two or even
three times and so be not only mother but possibly stepmother (a position
already freighted with negative connotations by the eleventh century),12 and
then find herself at the centre (or periphery) of a tangled family group which
might or might not support her in her old age. In fact, the only predictable
element was death.
Thus the framework we started with, tracing a linear progression through
a clearly defined set of life stages – perhaps a life course rather than a life-
cycle – was disturbed and disrupted by the actualities of medieval women’s
lives. A women’s progress through her life was also shaped by the context in
which we find her – a dutiful daughter might expect her family to ensure a
good marriage for her, but if her family were unable to provide the resources,
her period as a single woman might be more extended than that of her peers,
and she might be found instead entering service to save for her marriage.
Women working for pay in medieval Europe, whilst earlier highlighted by
feminist scholars concerned with modern pay disparity,13 has become a
somewhat neglected topic, for all that there has been a considerable amount
of older work on female servants.14 A single woman outside the natal home
might face challenges in maintaining her chastity or reputation in the face of
sexual attention by her male peers or employer. Similarly, a cherished wife’s
status could be irreparably damaged by malicious gossip (from both sexes)
or even rape by a man not her husband, regardless of whether her own
conduct was blameless.15 Reputation was a fragile thing, and gossip could
stick.16 A young widow, already married once, might not find she had much
classic guide to the theoretical frames for divorce, from the Roman to late-medieval
era, remains James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe
(Chicago, IL, 1987), passim.
12 In a letter written between 1061 and 1071, underlining the need for a son to treat his
mother with respect, St Peter Damian tells a story in which loving, maternal behaviour
is contrasted with the ‘harshness’ (duritia) of the stepmother: Die Briefe des Petrus
Damiani II, ed. K. Reindel, MGH Die Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit, IV. 2 (Munich,
1988), p. 458.
13 Judith Bennett, ‘Less Money than a Man would Take’, in History Matters: Patriarchy and
the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, PA, 2006), pp. 82–107. Here Bennett revisits
her own and others’ earlier work on the subject, and maintains that the continuities
visible between the medieval and modern gender gap in pay (only now beginning to
recede amongst young UK-based workers) is worthy of continued attention.
14 See Phillips, Medieval Maidens; P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Girls Growing up in Later
Medieval England’, History Today, 45 (1995), 25–32, http://www.historytoday.com/
jeremy-goldberg/girls-growing-later-medieval-england (accessed 29 November 2010);
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Women Servants in Florence’, in Women and Work in
Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington, 1986), pp. 59–80.
15 For example, Skinner and van Houts, Medieval Writings on Secular Women, texts 69,
pp. 151–4, an English rape case, and 71, pp. 156–8, a case of insult, from Venice.
16 Capturing medieval gossip usually happens through the study of litigation cases
16
in common with older women in the same situation, and might be pressured
into marrying again by both her natal and marital families, for different
reasons. Attitudes to remarriage varied by religion and across time, but its
existence is well documented in both textual and visual sources.17 Of course,
a second wife could find herself looking after the offspring of her husband’s
first marriage as stepmother, as well as having her own children by him: the
category ‘motherhood’, therefore, could be complicated.
Thus, medieval women’s lives did not necessarily fit neatly into a linear
pattern of progression from one life stage to the next. Another obvious crit-
icism of the life-stages approach to organizing sources is its tendency to
universalize across regional, racial, temporal and religious boundaries. Does
grouping together a wide variety of sources about marriage and mother-
hood, say, mean that married life and motherhood are experiences which
all (or almost all) women shared and responded to in a similar way? Of
course not. But a genuinely feminist project needs to allow for similarities
and shared experience between women to emerge, or for hitherto unnoticed
female spaces to be apparent in the medieval landscape, overlooked because
they occur only as fragmentary details in widely disparate sources. A notable
theme that emerged without really looking for it was that violence (and/or
violent language) against women was a fact of many women’s lives. Almost
immediately, therefore, the neat divisions between life stages were challenged,
since violence took many forms – verbal and physical – and was directed
at both young and older women. This is unsurprising, but it is still a truly
under-represented theme in medieval gender studies, despite its substantial
coverage by scholars working in later periods, and would reward major inter-
disciplinary, comparative work to interrogate whether this is indeed one of
the few ‘universals’ of women’s lives, regardless of age or social status.18
(whether or not for defamy) or literary texts, and thus has formed a focus for much
interdisciplinary work. See, for example, Chris Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance
among the Medieval Peasantry’, Past and Present 160 (1998), 3–24; Thelma Fenster
and Daniel Lord Smail (eds), Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval
Europe (Ithaca, NY, 2003); and Susan E. Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with
Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA, 2007).
17 For example, Peter Franklin, ‘Peasant Widows’ “Liberation” and Remarriage before
the Black Death’, Economic History Review 39 (1986), 186–204 (but see also Judith
Bennett, ‘Writing Fornication: Medieval Leyrwrite and its Historians’, TRHS, 6th ser.
13 (2003), 131–62); James A. Brundage, ‘Widows and Remarriage: Moral Conflicts and
Their Resolution in Classical Canon Law’, in Wife and Widow in Medieval England,
ed. Sue Sheridan Walker (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993), pp. 17–51.
18 For example, for the early modern period, Joseph P. Ward (ed.), Violence, Politics
and Gender in Early Modern England (London, 2008); Julie Gammon, Narratives of
Sexual Violence in England, 1640–1820 (Manchester, 2004); Elizabeth A. Robinson and
Christine A. Rose (eds), Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
(London, 2001). The literature on violence against women in the modern era is too
vast to list: a useful starting point is the bibliography at http://www.europrofem.org/
17
Patricia Skinner
Tracing exemplary life courses was further complicated by the fact that
the vast majority of women were documented only once. It is extremely
unusual to find a medieval woman documented throughout her life except in
the highly generic biographical works of the great and good (some of which
were used to expose precisely that formulaic genre).19 Even when a figure
appears in more than one place in a particular archive, a feature particularly
common in late-medieval court cases, it may well be difficult to reconstruct
the temporal order of events and questionable whether the researcher really
should intervene to produce a coherent ‘story’ or narrative of the case.20 Nor
would it have been particularly helpful to trace entire lives: by definition,
only remarkable women – chiefly through their position as rulers and/or
saints and/or writers – attracted the sustained attention of our authors. The
even fewer medieval women’s lives chronicled or revealed in writing by the
women themselves – for example, Dhuoda in the ninth century,21 Hildegard
material/books/09.book.htm (accessed 7 December 2009). Medieval work has yet

to reach the same density, although there are individual studies, for example, Anna
Roberts (ed.), Violence against Women in Medieval Texts (Gainsville, FL, 1998). See also
the first chapter of Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice in Medieval and
Early Modern Literatures (Berlin, 2007). All too often texts present women as victims:
for views on women as perpetrators see Ross Balzaretti, ‘“These are things men do, not
women”: The Social Regulation of Female Violence in Langobard Italy’, in Violence and
Society in the Early Medieval West, ed. Guy Halsall (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 175–92;
Dianne Hall (ed.), ‘A Great Effusion of Blood’: Interpreting Medieval Violence (Toronto,
2004). Literary studies include Albrecht Classen (ed.), Violence in Medieval Courtly
Literature: A Casebook (New York and London, 2004) and Katherine Quigg Olson,
‘Lady Killers: Women, Violence and Representation in Medieval English Literature’,
Ph.D. thesis, Columbia, 2008. Elizabeth Robertson, however, reminds us that violence
against women can and should not just be studied as a litany of women’s reduction to
objects of violation, but should also explore the survival strategies employed by those
violated, restoring their subjectivity and their voice to this most feminist of projects.
19 On the idiosyncrasies of medieval biographical writing see Janet L. Nelson, ‘Writing
Early Medieval Biography’, History Workshop 50 (2000), 129–36 and the essays collected
in David Bates, Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton (eds), Writing Medieval Biography
750–1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow (Woodbridge, 2006), in which
the editors and contributors interrogate the utility of the form in modern practice as
well as examining medieval examples.
20 See, for example, a fourteenth-century English rape case translated in Skinner and
van Houts, Medieval Writings on Secular Women, text 38, pp. 80–8, in which the
accounts of witnesses shift, obscuring the chronology. Jamie Page also highlighted the
methodological demands of piecing together the ‘story’ from fragmentary and often
conflicting statements in ‘Dubious Subjects: Prostitute Witnesses at an Abortion Trial
in Late Medieval Bavaria’, presented at the Gender and Medieval Studies conference,
‘Gender, Time and Memory’, in Swansea, 6–8 January 2011.
21 Dhuoda’s text, a book of admonition for her son, is translated as Dhuoda, Handbook for
William: A Carolingian Woman’s Councel for Her Son, trans. Carol Neel (Lincoln, NE,
1991) and Dhuoda: Handbook for Her Warrior Son, ed. and trans. Marcelle Thiébaux
(Cambridge, 1998); studies include Marie Anne Mayeski, Dhuoda: Ninth-Century
Mother and Theologian (Scranton, PA, 1995); Martin A. Claussen, ‘Fathers of Power
18
of Bingen in the twelfth,22 Christine de Pizan23 or Margery Kempe in the
fifteenth24 – are even more exceptional, and have all been heavily studied by
scholars over the years.25 We took a conscious decision, therefore, to move
away from such medieval ‘superstars’ (one or two make their appearance:
for example a vignette from Joan of Arc’s childhood) and explore women
whose lives are apparent only in one-moment snapshots. By exploring many
such moments in many lives alongside each other, a picture of the likely life
courses of women from a variety of backgrounds might be possible.
Such comparative work was not new, but was inspired by some of the
most interesting work in medieval women’s history in recent years, which
has had as its starting point a desire to challenge traditional boundaries and
approaches and to explore alongside each other sources which had tradi-
tionally not been compared. A good example of such comparative work
bearing very rich fruit is Elisheva Baumgarten’s sensitive book on northern
European Jewish and Christian mothers: by her careful reading of the often
difficult sources, she was able to discern something of a shared culture of
birth, even if religious practices differed and shaped the new mother and
and Mothers of Authority: Dhuoda and the Liber Manualis’, French Historical Studies 19
(1996), 785–809; Steven A. Stofferahn, ‘The Many Faces in Dhuoda’s Mirror: The Liber
Manualis and a Century of Scholarship’, Magistra 4 (1991), 89–134; James F. LePree,
‘Sources of Spirituality in the Liber Manualis of Dhuoda’, Magistra 14 (2008), 50–67;
Karen Cherewatuk, ‘Speculum matris: Duoda’s Manual’, Florilegium 10 (1988–1991),
49–64.
22 Hildegard now has a website devoted to her: http://www.hildegard.org/, where texts
and bibliography are regularly updated (accessed 28 November 2010).
23 Extensive bibliography and list of her works online at http://www.arlima.net/ad/
christine_de_pizan.html (accessed February 2012).
24 A useful guide to the literature on Kempe is included in the website Mapping Margery
Kempe, http://college.holycross.edu/projects/kempe/ (accessed 28 November 2010).
25 The catalogue of books about women writers in the Middle Ages is now vast: one of
the earliest and best was Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical
Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete (Cambridge, 1994). Others include
translated collections such as Katharina M. Wilson (ed.), Medieval Women Writers
(Athens, GA, 1984); Marcelle Thiébaux (ed.), The Writings of Medieval Women (New
York, 1997); Carolyne Larrington, Women and Writing in Medieval Europe (London,
1995). See also Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (eds), The Cambridge Companion
to Medieval Women’s Writing (Cambridge, 2003); Rebecca Krug, Reading Families:
Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY, 2002); Thérèse de
Hemptinne and Maria Gongora Diaz (eds), The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy
in a Men’s Church (Turnhout, 2004); Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (eds),
Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN, 2005); and
Diane Watt, Medieval Women Writers (Cambridge, 2007). The medieval volume on the
history of medieval British women’s writing, starting in the Anglo-Saxon period and
challenging preconceived notions of what constitutes women’s literary output, offers
rich new perspectives on the subject: Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt (eds),
History of British Women’s Writing, vol. 1: 700–1500 (Basingstoke, 2011).
19
Patricia Skinner
baby’s subsequent experiences.26 Similarly, to take marriage as an example,
Tehmina Goskar demonstrated through her comparison of medieval dowry
lists from southern Italy, Byzantium and Egypt that the material goods in
the trousseaux of new brides in the Christian and Jewish communities of
those regions shared a strikingly high number of common items, and that
the nomenclature for these also travelled with the goods themselves.27 There
is clear potential in both these examples not only for cross-regional, but
for wider cross-period dialogues, particularly with reference to the goods a
bride might still expect to receive. Thus I take issue with Madeline Caviness’s
recent emphasis, in an otherwise very useful survey of the past fifteen years
of scholarship, on the alterity of medieval culture and its neglect by those
outside the medieval academy, lamenting ‘if only contemporary theorists
would read what we write!’ To combat this gulf between periods, she argues
that medievalists should ‘adapt, rather than adopt, modern and postmodern
theories of gender and their intersection with race and class’,28 presumably
to make medieval studies more ‘familiar’. Certainly medievalists have much
to offer modern debates, as Bennett has commented and a recent volume of
essays has reiterated, but the key to doing so seems to be to explore points
of commonality between periods, rather than to create new and artificially-
adapted theoretical categories.29 Stages in the life-cycle offer an obvious entry
point to such work.
Thus, juxtaposing diverse sources encourages comparisons within medi-
eval studies, but with a gendered approach. By ‘gendered approach’ I mean
one that is sensitive to all forms of social oppression and exclusion (as
envisaged by the editors of Gender and History in 1989)30 and not just the
contrast between men’s and women’s experience. Certainly the book fore-
grounds women, but a gendered approach recognizes the inherent inequali-
ties between medieval women as well as their inequality, within each social
group, with men. This then leads to an investigation of the causes of such
inequality. Among medieval mothers, for example, their experience of moth-
26 Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe
(Princeton, NJ, 2004).
27 Tehmina Goskar, ‘Objects, People and Exchange: Material Culture in Medieval
Southern Italy, c. 600–c. 1200’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Southampton, 2009. And
see also her article, ‘Material Worlds: The Shared Cultures of Southern Italy and its
Mediterranean Neighbours in the 10th to 12th Centuries’, Al-Masaq 23 (2011), 189–204.
28 Madeline H. Caviness, ‘Feminism, Gender Studies and Medieval Studies’, Diogenes 225
(2010), 30–45.
29 In particular her chapter ‘Who’s Afraid of the Distant Past?’, in History Matters:
Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, 2006), pp. 30–53; Celia
Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifschitz and Amy G. Remensnyder (eds), Why
the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice (New York and London,
2012).
30 Editorial collective, ‘Why Gender and History?’, Gender and History 1 (1989), 1–6.
20
erhood was shaped by a myriad of conditions: their own birth and social
class, the age of the mother, whether this was her first or her thirteenth child,
her location, whether she was living with the father of her child, the sex of
the children she bore, and so on. The list is endless.
However, was the ‘life-cycle’ in fact more precisely a ‘marriage cycle’?
Given that we were studying secular women (rather than women religious,
again not a hard-and-fast division), were we justified in assuming that the
common trajectory for all of our subjects was indeed to emerge from girl-
hood into puberty, rapid marriage, repeated pregnancy, possible widowhood,
menopause and dotage of variable length ended by death with or without
commemoration? Or does this approach simply reinforce the heteronor-
mativity of studies on medieval subjects picked up on by literary scholars
influenced by the work of Karma Lochrie?31 Certainly, marital status has
functioned as a way of shaping many studies on medieval women, with
texts on married and widowed women, particularly the latter, dominating
the field.32 But the centrality of marriage within medieval women’s lives was
not necessarily a given: the older assumption that medieval women had a
choice between ‘marriage or the Church’ has been swept away by the growing
body of evidence for single and/or never-married women, who nevertheless
did not automatically find their vocation in a religious life.33 ‘Virginity’, as
31 Lochrie’s challenge to medievalists emerged in the late 1990s with her essay ‘Mystical
Acts, Queer Tendencies’, in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, J.
Schulz and Peggy McCracken (Minneapolis, MN, 1997), pp. 180–200, and has further
been developed in her delightful ‘Presidential Improprieties and Medieval Categories:
The Absurdity of Heterosexuality’, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and
Steven Kruger (Minneapolis, MN, 2001), pp. 87–96; and in her book Heterosyncrasies:
Female Sexuality when Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis, MN, 2005).
32 There are numerous essay collections: Louise Mirrer (ed.), Upon My Husband’s Death:
Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe (Ann Arbor, MI, 1992);
Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (eds), Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe (London, 1999); Sue Sheridan Walker (ed.), Wife and Widow in Medieval
England (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993); Michel Parisse (ed.), Veuves et veuvage dans le haut
moyen âge (Paris, 1993); Caroline Barron and Anne Sutton (eds), Medieval London
Widows, 1300–1500 (London, 1994). Specific studies include: Janet Nelson, ‘The Wary
Widow’, in Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Wendy Davies and Paul
Fouracre (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 82–113; Albrecht Classen, ‘Widows: Their Social and
Moral Functions According to Medieval German Literature, with Special Emphasis
on Erhart Gross’s Witwenbuch (1446)’, Fifteenth Century Studies 28 (2003), 65–79;
Emmanuelle Santinelli, Des femmes éplorées? Les veuves dans la société aristocratique
du haut Moyen Âge (Lille, 2003).
33 Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past
(Philadelphia, PA, 1998) started the debate, highlighting the little-known world of
the medieval single woman. This led to a concerted campaign of documentation:
Phillips, Lewis and Menuge, Young Medieval Women, collected essays on different
manifestations of young women’s lives in both historical and literary sources, whilst
Phillips went on to a more sustained treatment in her Medieval Maidens. The issue
21
Patricia Skinner
Sarah Salih has emphasized, was a fluid term expressing different choices
only loosely connected with a woman’s actual physical state.34 Such women
may have been in the minority (and the link between marriage and property
exchange guarantees that wives are much more visible in the historical record
than spinsters), but the questioning, or queering, of our assumptions has
at least rescued the latter group as a focus for research. This work, and the
emergence of the idea of a ‘third gender’, whilst enabling more discussion of
groups which do not fit adequately into the male/female, heterosexual binary
(including, for example, medieval eunuchs, hermaphrodites and transsexuals,
as well as cross-dressers), has, however, not done much to deconstruct the
marital monolith in women’s history.35
Very rapidly, therefore, it became clear that whilst women might move
temporally through their lives, their pathways were not as clear as we might
have assumed from normative literature: they could find themselves repeating
certain stages of it once, twice or several times. Bettina Bildhauer, exploring
literary depictions of bereavement, has termed this the ‘gendered stagna-
tion of time’, as subjects enter a state of suspension of linear time as they
assimilate the rupture that has occurred.36 The unexpected ending of a life
stage, such as a marriage, might bring with it a period of stasis, as a woman
of never-married women was elaborated upon by Bennett in her more recent History
Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, PA, 1993), especially
pp. 108–28, where she discusses ‘lesbian-like’ medieval lives as a way of avoiding
‘heteronormative blinders, sexist ideologies or modernist assumptions’ (p. 128). Her
call has been taken up by Cordelia Beattie, whose Medieval Single Women: The Politics
of Social Classification in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2007) specifically addresses
the question of how such women were categorized by their contemporaries.
34 Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2001).
35 Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture
and History (New York, 1994) was influential. The hermaphrodite was of most interest
to legislators: the Digest of Justinian addresses them explicitly, as did medieval Islamic
law, for which see Paula Sander, ‘Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in
Medieval Islamic law’, in Women in Middle Eastern History, ed. Nikki Keddie and Beth
Baron (New Haven, CT, 1991), pp. 75–95. On sexuality see below, note 48. On eunuchs
see Shaun Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (London, 2008);
Kathryn Ringrose, The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender
in Byzantium (Chicago, 2003); and Liz James (ed.), Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender
in Byzantium (London, 1997). On cross-dressing: Valerie Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the
Man: Female Cross-Dressing in Medieval Europe (New York, 1996) and David Lorenzo
Boyd and Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘“Ut cum muliere”: A Male Transvestite Prostitute in
Fourteenth-Century London’, in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and
Carla Freccero (London, 1996), pp. 99–116. As an idea, third gender has regularly been
applied to medieval religious men and women as well as the other groups mentioned,
with varying success: see Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifschitz (eds), Gender and Christianity
in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives (Philadelphia, PA, 2008).
36 Bettina Bildhauer, ‘Melancholia, Revenge and the Gendered Stagnation of Time’, paper
presented at the Gender and Medieval Studies conference, ‘Gender Time and Memory’,
in Swansea, 6–8 January 2011.
22
negotiated the unravelling and reordering of her social ties and status. What
happened in the immediate present threatened all that had happened or been
achieved by the woman in the past, and potentially barred access to the future
planned for her, preventing her from performing her chosen role?37 (The
birth of children, it has been suggested, was another temporary period of
fracture, as postpartum women awaited their reintegration into the commu-
nity through rituals of purification.38) Strikingly, visual representations of
second and third wives on late medieval memorials unwittingly reproduce
this sense of suspended time, as the brasses attached were often ‘off the shelf ’
and thus might represent earlier and later spouses with precisely the same
features and thus apparently the same age.39 Medieval sources rarely state age
in years to enable us to map a woman’s progress through some or all of these
stages, and even more rarely do we hear a woman’s own voice commenting
on her situation, but her position in these moments of transition could be
read negatively, as extremely vulnerable, or positively, as a time when she
was free to make choices about her future life course (and this dichotomy of
possible readings has of course shaped much work on medieval widowhood).
In theory, the life now stretching out ahead of her might be radically different
from her own (and others’) expectations, and, depending on how old she
was when this break occurred, it might open new opportunities. Thus, any
consideration of the life course also has to take into account the possibility of
age influencing levels of fluctuating female agency: Anneke Mulder-Bakker,
for example, has shown how many female writers of the period were most
active in their advanced years.40
Linked to this temporary displacement from linear time is the issue of a
woman’s visibility: Eric Wolf has argued that a significant proportion of the
world’s population were a ‘people without history’, that is, excluded from
the economic and social developments characterizing Europe’s ‘progress’
37 Isabel Davis captured the sense of this in her ‘The Late Medieval Now: Women,
Marriage and the Contemporary’, presented at the Gender and Medieval Studies
conference, ‘Gender, Time and Memory’, in Swansea, 6–8 January 2011. This reflected
on the Pauline notion of use and performance of a role, rather than being defined by
it.
38 The temporary suspension is highlighted by Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, pp.
112–14. See also Becky R. Lee, ‘The Purification of Women after Childbirth: A Window
onto Medieval Perceptions of Women’, Florilegium 14 (1995–6), 43–55; Paula M. Rieder,
On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 (London,
2006).
39 I was led to this point by Diane Wolfthal’s keynote lecture at the Gender and Medieval
Studies conference, ‘Gender, Time and Memory’, in Swansea, 6–8 January 2011, titled
‘Remembering Serial Marriage in Medieval Europe’.
40 Anneke Mulder-Bakker, ‘The Metamorphosis of Woman: Transmission of Knowledge
and the Problems of Gender’, Gender and History 12.4 (2000), 642–64.
23
Patricia Skinner
into the modern era.41 Wolf ’s ideas were influential within gender theory,
where his model of exclusion was held to be applicable to vast swathes of
women as well as preliterate peoples. Most women, too, were ‘people without
history’, unnoted and unnoticed, and certainly economically disadvantaged
in comparison to men of the same class.42 Only at times of transition or
crisis might they appear as actors in the record. A good example of this is
the widow Floritia, from Ravello in Italy, whose life was otherwise unremark-
able except that she found herself, at different ends of her life, needing to
document her property. In 1199 she made her will, leaving all her goods to
Floreria, her married daughter, on condition that Floreria and her husband,
Sergius, should take care of her in her old age and infirmity. If, however,
Floritia’s two sons gave their sister a specified sum of money to spend on
Floritia, then they would share the inheritance equally with her.43 Another
document survives recording Floritia’s own marriage some fifty-six years
prior to her will, and the dowry that she received from her own widowed
mother at that point.44 The age at which a girl was married varied throughout
Europe – Hajnal’s model of the ‘European marriage pattern’, positing later
marriage for girls in western Europe than in other regions of the world in
the sixteenth century, encouraged medievalists to explore the topic earlier on,
and challenge certain elements of it. For example, the daughters of the very
rich, and more girls in southern Europe and in non-Christian communities,
are seen to marry earlier, particularly if, as Floritia did, they had a dowry to
take with them into their marriage.45 Even so, Floritia at her marriage cannot
41 Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, CA, 1982).
42 K. Anne Pyburn, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Complex Society’, in Ungendering
Civilization, ed. K. Anne Pyburn (New York, 2004), pp. 1–46, is one of the most
articulated reflections on Wolf ’s ideas.
43 Skinner and van Houts, Medieval Writings on Secular Women, text 121, p. 255.
44 Vincenzo Criscuolo (ed.), Le pergamene dell’Archivio vescovile di Minori (Amalfi, 1987),
p. 54, document 49. Unfortunately the detail of this document is now lost.
45 John Hajnal, ‘European Marriage Patterns in Perspective’, in Population in History:
Essays in Historical Demography, ed. David V. Glass and David E. C. Eversley (London,
1975), pp. 101–53. It is probably better termed the ‘north-western’ European marriage
pattern, since practice in the Mediterranean, especially amongst high-status families,
differed considerably: a classic statement is still Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Urban Growth
and Family Structure in Medieval Genoa’, Past and Present 66 (1975), 3–28, and this
regional difference was recognized by Richard Smith, ‘Geographical Diversity in the
Resort to Marriage in Late Medieval Europe’, in Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women
in English Society, c. 1200–1500, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg (Stroud, 1992), pp. 19–59; see
also David B. Rheubottom, ‘“Sisters first”: Betrothal Order and Age at Marriage in
Fifteenth-Century Ragusa’, Journal of Family History 13 (1988), 359–76. Steven M.
Lowenstein, ‘Ashkenazic Jewry and the European Marriage Pattern: A Preliminary
Survey of Jewish Marriage Age’, Jewish History 8 (1992), 155–75 found that girls married
early in the medieval period, but that age at marriage increased by the eighteenth
century.
24
have been any younger than fourteen or fifteen, meaning that by the time
she made her will she would have been in her seventies at least. Whether
this meant she was ‘old’ is open to debate: her own measures in her will
suggest that she perceived herself to have reached a stage in her life where
she would become ill and/or need care. Crucially, however, the moments
at which she appears in the record are linked to transitional periods in her
life, and both are associated with transfers of property. The intervening five
decades are a total blank.
Floritia was one of the lucky ones – her will suggests that she had property
to give and children to rely upon for her care. Contracts from elsewhere in
medieval Europe suggest that older women might sometimes have to enter
into employment as servants46 – itself a return to a status more characteristic
of younger people – to put a roof over their heads, and very occasionally
the breakdown of care agreements makes it into the record as well. Thus
Constantina, daughter of Kometos of Oppido in Calabria, gifted half her
estate to the Greek bishopric there in 1054. A clause then continues: ‘as for
my adopted son, Peter Boukarinos … who agreed in writing to support me
in my old age and who instead has become insolent and scornful and full
of reproaches … I annul my previous dispositions in his favour and exclude
him completely from any claim to my lands’.47 Constantina’s document is
another reminder of the unpredictability of the life course: she had planned
her future, but estrangement had disrupted her scheme. Again, only a change
in her status made it into the record.
Thus, although the advantage of using life-cycle as a means of under-
standing women’s (and men’s) lives is to break down the regional and temporal
boundaries which often shape specific studies of women’s lives in medieval
Europe, the scheme nevertheless has to remain sufficiently flexible to accom-
modate women whose social categorization may have been fluid even in the
era in which they lived. So, to return to the question as to whether section
headings on ‘Birth and Infancy’, ‘Girls and Young Women’, ‘Married Women
and Mothers’, ‘Widows, Older Women and Death’ adequately cover the even-
tualities of a medieval woman’s life: as I have already noted, they do, perhaps,
46 For example, Skinner and van Houts, Medieval Writings on Secular Women, text 103,
p. 218, a widow entering service in Marseilles, translated from Business Contracts of
Medieval Provence: Selected Notulae from the Cartulary of Giraud Amalric of Marseilles,
1248, ed. John H. Pryor (Toronto, 1981), no. 68, pp. 189–90.
47 La Theotokos de Hagia Agathè (Oppido) (1050–1064/5), ed. André Guillou (Vatican City,
1972), document 30, pp. 129–31: ‘tōn Petron ton Boukarinōn …// … eine pneumatikon
mou eion kai engraphos epeiēsan apton kakēnos pros eme, ēna me// doulagōgy eis
to gyras kai adeivameian mou kai gerotrophi me; kai antei ton agathon//… chy tou
peiuse eis emen, epeiusen ybris kai ateimeias kai onidos …// … pantes ei gutniountes
kai akiro kai apodeixo touton apo teis gonikis mou eipostaseos pantelos, deiotei
ouden agathon epeiusen is emen, ta de// […] apo tēs upostaseos mou as tou eisein
charismena’.
25
Patricia Skinner
exclude more than we intended the possibility of the never-married secular
woman, as well as same-sex relationships (whose visibility is in most cases
contested, the main argument being the tension between a perceived and
documented sexual act and how far this is evidence of a sexual identity).48
They also, of course, overlap, since some are age related and some refer to
marital status. But they have proven effective tools to think about the similar-
ities between women’s lives as well as their obvious differences. The sense of
sisterhood that early feminism engendered is not visible in our sources, but
the similar experiences of some of our women, however distanced by time,
rank, religion or place, suggest that we should not entirely reject earlier work
on medieval women that celebrated the often cyclical or arrested journey to
and through womanhood as a category for investigation.
The question that remains is: how might the complex movement of a
woman through multiple, overlapping and oft-repeated life stages have
affected her memories? If medieval women were indeed the main reposi-
tories of family memories – and this assertion does not need to be read as
devaluing that role or seeing it as in some way inferior to the largely mascu-
line dominance of written culture49 – then their cyclical journey through
life, stopping, revisiting, re-starting stages, may in fact have served to rein-
force memory through repetition. That is, by travelling more slowly and in
shorter stages, women may have had more opportunity to store fragments of
memory overlooked by their menfolk. This is an area that would bear more
scrutiny, although the essay by Fiona Harris-Stoertz in this present volume
makes a significant inroad into such an investigation, of course.50
48 John Boswell’s pioneering Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay

People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth
Century (Chicago, IL, 1980), whilst attracting criticism for its positivist reading of some
of its sources, nevertheless stimulated scholars into a serious consideration of issues of
medieval sexuality. The literature is now vast, including Vern L. Bullough and James A.
Brundage (eds), Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York, 1996); Karma Lochrie et
al. (eds), Constructing Medieval Sexuality (see n. 31 above). Recent contributions have
included a survey volume by Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing
Unto Others (New York, 2005) and April Harper and Caroline Proctor (eds), Medieval
Sexuality: A Casebook (London, 2008).
49 Janet L. Nelson, ‘Gender and Genre in Women Historians of the Early Middle Ages’,
in L’historiographie médiévale en Europe, ed. J.-P. Genet (Paris, 1991) has often been
misinterpreted as arguing for women as family historians, when in fact she was
exploring how anonymous texts from the early Middle Ages might be attributed to
female authorship. See also Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe
900–1200 (Basingstoke, 1999); Patricia Skinner, ‘Memory and Gender in Medieval Italy’,
in Men, Women and the Past in Medieval Europe, ed. Elisabeth van Houts (London,
2000), pp. 36–52; and ‘Gender, Memory and Jewish Identity: Reading a Family History
from Medieval Southern Italy’, Early Medieval Europe 13 (2005), 277–96.
50 And see also Becky Lee, ‘Men’s Recollections of a Women’s Rite: Medieval English
Men’s Recollections Regarding the Rite of Purification of Women after Childbirth’,
Gender and History 14:2 (2002), 224–41.
26
As a final comment, we might consider how a life-stages approach might
work to better understand medieval secular men. Would their lives be as
complex as women’s, more so or less? Would they experience the same
ruptures? Were there timeless moments of suspension in medieval men’s lives?
If women’s lives were put on hold just after childbirth or during menstrua-
tion, when they were physically leaky and/or ritually impure, might men have
experienced similar dislocation or even vulnerability when laid up sick or
injured? I suggest that although much valuable work has been done on certain
stages of medieval men’s lives, as well as on the theme of masculinity (defini-
tions, performance, loss), there is a pressing need for medieval secular men’s
lives to come under a similar scrutiny to women’s. That male and female lives
were held to play out to different rhythms was certainly recognized in Jewish
culture: the provisions of Jewish law expected a man to perform certain reli-
gious duties at specific times, whilst a woman’s duties were not time bound
in this way. Thus a woman who chose to perform time-bound rituals was
implicitly crossing a gendered divide – something that Daisy Black touches
upon elsewhere in this volume in her essay on the N-town Marian plays.51
Whilst Christian culture did not maintain such an explicit divide, there was
still a strong sense that time was a commodity, and had an intrinsic value.52
My guess is that men’s progression through life might look rather different,
not least because the concerns of medieval authors might not have included
a man’s development as a man, but instead tied his identity far more explic-
itly to what he did, what he owned etc., and thus convey a more dynamic
image of forward progression through time, rather than periods of stillness
and repetition.53 In theory, then, anything that stopped a man performing
(be it the physical labour of the field, engaging in combat or even being the
king) threatened this forward momentum. Whether this buys back into the
dichotomy of active/public/male and passive/private/female lives, so crucial
to modern social theorists and early historians of women but challenged
51 Simha Goldin, ‘Female Time and Male Time in the Middle Ages’, unpublished paper
presented at Leeds International Medieval Congress in the session ‘Jewish Concepts of
Time in the Middle Ages’, 2000. His arguments are now developed in Simha Goldin,
Jewish Women in Europe in the Middle Ages: A Quiet Revolution (Manchester, 2011),
especially Chapter 6: ‘Women and the mitzvot’; Baumgarten, Mothers and Children,
p. 88.
52 See the discussion in Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages
(Chicago, IL, 1980). Le Goff was discussing the Church’s view of merchants who
charged extra for late repayment of loans, thereby commodifying the additional time
in a usurious fashion.
53 The contrast between event-based progression through time and the exclusion of those
who did not participate in the events was central to Wolf ’s argument in his Europe
and the People without History. How this exclusion affected women is also the subject
of Judith Bennett, ‘“History that Stands Still”: Women’s Work in the European Past’,
Feminist Studies 14 (1988), 269–83. Bennett’s article provoked substantial debate in the
years after its publication.
27
Patricia Skinner
roundly by medievalists, is a matter for debate:54 but a study of medieval
secular men, far from undermining the feminist project, might well provide
yet more material to energize and revivify it in an age when the hard-won
achievements of earlier generations of medieval feminist scholarship are in
danger of being forgotten.55
54 For example, the essays in Leslie Brubaker and Julia M. H. Smith (eds), Gender in the
Early Medieval World: East and West (Cambridge, 2004).
55 A concern raised by Bennett in History Matters, pp. 6–29. See also Elizabeth Robertson’s
‘Medieval Feminism in Middle English Studies: A Retrospective’, Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature 26 (2007), 67–79, in which she highlights the disappearance of
references to feminism in current medieval debates. Caviness, ‘Feminism, Gender
Studies and Medieval Studies’, is more optimistic. The problem of historical amnesia
within academia is epitomized by the patchy Gender and Medieval Studies conference
history recorded on http://www.medievalgender.co.uk/ (accessed 21 January 2011).
28
2
Medieval Expiration Dating? Queer Time and

Spatial Dislocation in Aucassin et Nicolette
Victoria Turner
A n effeminate hero, an aggressive heroine and a pregnant king: at first

sight, it is perhaps unsurprising to find an analysis of the Old French
Aucassin et Nicolette within a collection where gender is a key consideration.
In the twentieth century, scholars tended to focus upon the gender identities
portrayed in this chantefable, with many maintaining the view that Nicolette,
a Saracen princess-turned-slave, has decidedly masculine characteristics, and
that Aucassin, a Christian prince, is rather pathetic in his amusing passiv-
ity.1 Such approaches often emerge in discussions of the possible parodic or
humorous nature of the protagonists.2 The present study, however, brings the
question of gender troubling into dialogue with both temporal and spatial
movements in the text and aims to consider the extent to which moments of
dislocation, whether of space or time, may determine the gender identities
presented. More importantly, in the process, I aim to explore the possibility
that, in the manner of modern-day ‘expiration dating’ (where a relationship
is characterized by its very lack of a future), this tale may propose cross-
cultural, youthful love as a hiatus in the lives of the protagonists and thus
as a moment where linear time is suspended:3 a moment, in short, of queer
1 Roger Pensom in Aucassin et Nicolette, for instance, prioritizes the gender inversions
apparent in this work: ‘It is precisely in its undoing of apparently fixed ideas of gender-
identity that the thirteenth-century story of Aucassin and Nicolete is so extraordinary’,
Aucassin et Nicolete: The Poetry of Gender and Growing Up in the French Middle Ages
(Bern, 1999), p. 14.
2 June Hall Martin, Love’s Fools: Aucassin, Troilus, Calisto and the Parody of the Courtly
Lover (London, 1972).
3 Such relationships are entered into for the precise reason that there is a time limit
to their success, which offers parallels with the hedonistic behaviour of Aucassin and
Nicolette. The concept of ‘expiration dating’ is discussed by Ria Snellinx in relation to
the American Sitcom Sex and the City in ‘Humour that Divides, Humour that Unites:
American Sitcoms. A Case in Point’, Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education 2.2
(2009), 267–77 (269).
29
Victoria Turner
time dictated by a simultaneous living for the moment, yet also by concern
for the future.
Aucassin et Nicolette, referred to as a chantefable by its narrator, is clearly
concerned with questions of movement, whether temporal, spatial or psycho-
logical. It is centred upon a boy-meets-girl scenario and seems at first sight
to narrate a move away from youth and family ties that leads to the traversal
of foreign climes and the assumption of adult responsibility. Furthermore, it
is not only the protagonists who are engaged in such a journey: as Jill Tatter-
sall has noted, this is a text where the author is ‘repeatedly and deliberately
displacing his audience’s horizon of expectations’.4 Most obviously, this is
achieved through the interlacing of different generic forms and themes, such
as those of chanson de geste, roman d’aventure or lyric poetry, further split
between an alternating verse and prose structure.5 While the reader may be
left disoriented by this text, the same confusion does not necessarily apply
to the fictional world presented. Rather than resulting in a society devoid of
cohesion in a realm of geo-temporal limbo, the collage effect produced by
this fluctuation of character and form does not impede the ultimate assump-
tion of social responsibility. However, I argue that the concluding scene of
domestic felicity is possible only thanks to the enactment of journeys across
both spaces and times, journeys that provide the couple with the possibility
of a future and thus, by extension, ensure a form of normative chronological
progression based upon the assumption of rulership, marriage and, presum-
ably, procreation. Yet, during the spatial peregrinations of the protagonists,
a period of queer time also emerges, where simultaneous but contrasting
temporal experiences exist side by side. As a result, what the protagonists
learn in this text is not so much to grow up and suppress their childish
behaviour, but to combine competing temporalities.
The notion of queer time has typically been used to refer to non-hetero-
sexual experiences of time, an assumption that Ben Davies and Jana Funke
set out to challenge in Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture.6 Prob-
4 Jill Tattersall, ‘Shifting Perspectives and the Illusion of Reality in Aucassin et Nicolette’,
French Studies 38 (1984), 257–67 (257).
5 The prose/verse structure of the text has been analysed by Eugene Vance in ‘Aucassin et
Nicolette as a Medieval Comedy of Signification and Exchange’, in The Nature of Medieval
Narrative, ed. Minette Grunmann-Goudet and Robin F. Jones (Lexington, KY, 1980), pp.
57–76. See also his Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln,
NE, 1986), pp. 152–84, especially p. 162 for the tension between poetry and prose in this
text.
6 The relationship between homosexuality and the queering of time has a complicated
history. Early theorists such as Freud linked homosexuality with being temporally
backwards, which was subsequently re-evaluated in the rise of gay and lesbian history
in the 1970s. For the development of theories of queer time, see Elizabeth Freeman,
‘Introduction’ to ‘Queer Temporalities’, special edition of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian
30
Medieval Expiration Dating?
lematizing the association between sexuality and temporality, including the
dichotomy between ‘normative futures and queer (non-)futures’, they remind
us that:
To be temporally backwards or forwards, to delay or defer the future, to expand
or dilate the moment – all of these practices can be understood as resistances
against a time that marches forward and connects past, present and future in
a straight line.7
It is in this light that I refer to the presentation of time in Aucassin et Nico-

lette as queer: in essence, the text focuses upon a period of time in which
the assumption of adulthood is arrested and in which the protagonists are
often driven by the pleasure of the moment rather than future considerations.
This notion of pleasure seeking is also central to Lee Edelman’s conception of
(non-heterosexual) queer time as being opposed to ‘the Child as the emblem
of futurity’s unquestioned value’. Using a Lacanian approach, he suggests that
the negativity associated with the queer should be welcomed in the disavowal
of a future guaranteed by reproduction.8 In this light, queer time is based
upon ‘pleasure in a desire that cannot offer long-term fulfilment’,9 and it is
this prioritisation of short-term enjoyment that I suggest may share parallels
with the notion of ‘expiration dating’. Edelman further argues that cultural
fantasy places homosexuality in relation to jouissance and thus ‘locates
homosexuality in the place of the sinthome’, where the sinthome is a core
of enjoyment existing beyond meaning or interpretation. The result is that
homosexuality
figures the availability of an unthinkable jouissance that would put an end to
fantasy – and, with it, to futurity – by reducing the assurance of meaning in
Studies, 13.2/3 (2007), 159–76. Lee Edelman, for instance, prioritizes the relationship
between homosexuality and queer time in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
(Durham, NC, 2004). Judith Halberstam reminds us that while queer time is indeed
linked to ‘opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction’, it
may also be detached from sexuality. See Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place:
Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York, 2005), p. 1. Davies and Funke note that
Carolyn Dinshaw’s work uses queer time to rethink queer/straight binary divisions. See
Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, ed. Ben Davies and Jana Funke (Basingstoke,
2011), p. 9, and Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-
and Postmodern (Durham, NC, 1999), especially ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–55. As discussed by
McAvoy in the Introduction to this volume, Dinshaw’s recent publication also deals with
the queerness of time and focuses on the idea of ‘now’, forms of asynchronicity and the
heterogeneity of the present. See Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts,
Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC, and London, 2012).
7 Davies and Funke, ‘Introduction’, in Sex, Gender and Time, p. 10.
8 Edelman, No Future, p. 4.
31
Victoria Turner
fantasy’s promise of continuity to the meaningless circulation and repetitions
of the drive.10
In this Lacanian paradigm, the sinthome is essentially ‘the template of a given

subject’s distinctive access to jouissance’.11 If, for Edelman, homosexuality is
thus positioned within a system of reproductive futurism as a template for
accessing pleasure but which has no regard to the future, could this offer a
way in which to read the emphasis upon instant gratification in Aucassin
et Nicolette? The couple’s union is deemed to have no future by Aucassin’s
parents and Nicolette’s godfather, and even Nicolette herself tells Aucassin
that she can never be his because of his family’s objections (XIII, 8–12).12 In
this light, does the denial of the expiration date to their relationship expose
continuity (in particular, the familial continuity achieved through approved,
reproductive bonds) as meaningless repetition? In particular, given the fluidity
of gender in this text, can the heterogeneity of time be seen as analogous to
the queer time characterizing Edelman’s discussion of homosexuality?
Perhaps in contrast to Edelman’s emphasis upon sexuality, in Aucassin
et Nicolette the portrayal of an adolescent period of queer time cannot be
dissociated from questions of space. Referring to the hybridized temporali-
ties of colonial spaces, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has commented that ‘within
these places […] time likewise loses its smooth universality, its exteriority, its
rigidity’.13 Extending his call to think time in relation to spatial coordinates,
I suggest that in Aucassin et Nicolette heterogeneous temporalities appear as
a consequence of the travels undertaken. In her discussion of travel in rela-
tion to time in The Book of John Mandeville, Carolyn Dinshaw notes that ‘to
travel east in this book is an asynchronous activity: it is to travel back in
time’. However, she also states that eastward travel is a movement ‘toward and
into more explicitly heterogeneous temporalities’.14 For Aucassin and Nico-
lette, the goal-oriented nature of their travels and the imprecise geographies
encountered do not so much take them out of the present time but, rather,
place them into multiple times simultaneously and, more importantly, estab-
lish harmony. Heterogeneity thus allows competing experiences of time to be
reconciled and the dislocation of genders and generations to be overcome.
For instance, Nicolette’s past – her status as a former Saracen slave – is what
prevents Aucassin from accepting his current responsibilities and divides him
from his father. Travel, however, allows Nicolette to dismiss the durability of

11 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London, 1996),
p. 191; Edelman, No Future, p. 35.
12 Aucassin et Nicolette, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris, 1984). All references are to this edition
with sections as Roman numerals, then line numbers in Arabic numerals. All translations
are my own.
13 Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis, MN, 2003), p. 18.
14 Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, pp. 75 and 78.
32
her (Saracen) genealogy, transforming her limited relationship with Auca-
ssin into a forward-looking heterosexual union. Likewise, travel overcomes
the stasis caused by Aucassin’s periods of passive introspection and channels
Nicolette’s pro-activeness into a conventional ending. The gender identities
of the protagonists will be seen to be determined by temporal experiences
produced through travel, with gender being thus temporalized – as opposed
to time somehow being gendered.
This study will thus bring moments of queer time into relation with
journeying abroad. I argue that the older generation attempts to drag the
young protagonists into a heteronormative temporality that is compatible
with neither their gender identities nor the cross-cultural baggage haunting
their relationship, and that must be discovered instead through travel. Yet
does the circularity of the travels undertaken mean they are at odds with
the linear temporal resolution offered by the text’s conclusion? Taking the
labels proposed by Jane Gilbert, if Nicolette must become the ‘Good Chris-
tian Girl’ of Aucassin’s expectations and Aucassin must in turn become the
subject to her object, does their experience of time also become normative?15
In temporal terms, this predictable resolution would suggest that the fluidity
of the gender identities presented exists only insofar as the protagonists are
in a period of transition from adolescence to adulthood, and that Edelman’s
system of reproductive futurism is present (albeit determined by the genea-
logical suitability of the pair). Rather than countering an ‘investment placed
in the (ever-deferred) future, most commonly in the figure of the child’,16 in
this text the combined presentism and futurism displayed by its youthful
protagonists is primarily at odds with the inherited obligations and emphasis
upon origins evinced by the older generation.
From the outset, the conflict between generations shows that progression
from past to present is far from linear in this text. Temporal and spatial
continuity is threatened rather than ensured by genealogical progression in
the first récit. Count Garin de Beaucaire, Aucassin’s father, is at war with
Count Bougar de Valence and the conflict is said to be ‘si grande et si mervel-
leuse et si mortel’ (so great, so terrible and so deadly) (II, 2–3) that not a
day goes by without fighting. The repetitive accumulation of adjectives here
emphasizes the ceaselessness of the violence, echoed just three lines later
by the repeated imperfect verb in the Old French description of the total
destruction of Garin’s territory: ‘si li argoit sa terre et gastoit son païs et ocioit
ses homes’ (and so [Bougar] burnt his lands, laid waste to his territory and
killed his people) (II, 6). The constancy and destructive power of Bougar
are immediately set in relief by the description of Garin as ‘vix et frales, si
avoit son tans trespassé’ (old and frail and thus had outlived his time) (II,
15 Jane Gilbert, ‘The Practice of Gender in Aucassin et Nicolette’, Forum for Modern
Language Studies 33 (1997), 217–28 (especially 222–5).
33
Victoria Turner
7–8), underlining that Garin’s time, unlike the duration of the war, seems to
be over. As a result, a relentless violence seems to hold sway over a waning
source of authority. Yet even this assessment is somewhat paradoxical, as
the word ‘trespasser’ emphasizes that Garin’s time is diminishing but also
evokes notions of surpassing or exceeding, as if the very act of continuing for
too long had simultaneously ensured his downfall. The future of Beaucaire
should instead lie in the form of Garin’s only son, Aucassin, but it appears
that in the grip of love, the young man ‘ne voloit estre cevalers, ne les armes
prendre, n’aler au tornoi, ne fare point de quanque il deust’ (did not want
to be a knight, nor take up arms, go to tournaments or do anything he was
supposed to do) (II, 17–18). Once again the author uses a repetitive syntac-
tical structure here. However, in contrast to the continuousness suggested by
the use of the imperfect tense as mentioned above, Aucassin is presented here
in negatives, making him static in action and consequently static in time. By
refusing to assume his role as knight and rejecting his duties, he refuses to
accept his inherited position: in short, he refuses to grow up and assume a
place within a linear temporal order passing from father to son.
In light of his static behaviour, it could be argued that Aucassin insists upon
remaining within a time of adolescence. Both he and Nicolette are affection-
ately referred to as ‘biax enfans petis’ (lovely young people) (I, 3), suggesting
youth, at least, if not childhood. This is further emphasized by his description
as ‘damoisiax’ (young nobleman) (II, 10) which, as Dufournet reminds us,
refers to a young nobleman who has not yet been made a knight.17 Coupled
with his refusal to assume the roles expected of him by the older generation,
Aucassin seems to be living a form of ‘stretched out adolescence’ that may
perhaps be read in terms of Judith Halberstam’s notion of queer temporality
rather than Edelman’s anti-child paradigm. For Halberstam, queer tempo-
rality ‘disrupts the normative narrative of time’ in a society within which ‘the
emergence of the adult from the dangerous and unruly period of adolescence’
is seen as part of the necessary maturation process.18 In Aucassin’s case, this
period of disruption is most evident in récit X, where he makes an agreement
with his father’s enemy after his father reneges on his promise to grant him a
kiss from Nicolette as a reward for taking up arms. The severity of Aucassin’s
actions in this case is made clear by his subsequent incarceration; his love has
led to his loss of liberty. According to Halberstam, social disruption occurs
when the adolescent subject does not move from the dependency of child-
hood to marriage and the subsequent assumption of responsibility associated
with adulthood through reproduction.19 While not as negative as Edelman’s
association of queerness with a disregard for the future, Halberstam’s discus-
17 Aucassin et Nicolette, p. 165, n. 6.

18 Halberstam, Queer Time, p. 152.
19 Halberstam, Queer Time, p. 153.
34
sion of this period of adolescence is nonetheless grounded in the principle
of reproductive futurism. This is a heteronormative, linear approach to time
whereby the present is understood as reliant upon ‘a presumed future’,20 one
that is confirmed by the figure of the child as the representation of innocence
and hope. The irony is, of course, in Aucassin’s case that his desire for Nico-
lette is both the cause of his failure to mature, yet also potentially the means
of ensuring such a maturation process through the begetting of children;
he desires to be united with Nicolette, yet his parents object to the match.
Rather paradoxically, it seems that his parents are thus the instigators of the
expiration date to the relationship, while Aucassin desires its future, albeit a
future based on a continuation of present pleasure rather than progression
to a productive union.
In this respect, while Edelman’s interpretation of queer time and futu-
rity suggests that queerness brings children and childhood to an end,21 in
Aucassin et Nicolette, queerness, in both a gendered and temporal sense,
instead seems to characterize their youthful relationship. It is arguably
the protagonists’ assumption of a normalized heterosexuality (represented
through marriage) that confirms their adulthood at the end of the text. As
Hélène Cixous comments, ‘all human beings are originally bisexual’ in that,
although they come to identify with specific adult models as they grow, ‘these
identificatory determinations are belated, and there is a whole period which
Freud describes when there is a bisexual potential’.22 Halberstam’s theory of
adolescence thus seems a more appropriate lens through which to think of
the protagonists in Aucassin et Nicolette, rather than Edelman’s opposition
between the queer and the child, since youth in this work is instead a period
of queer time in itself in which heterosexual norms may be explored. In
addition, despite the fact that there is an emphasis on age, on the parent–
child relationship and even, arguably, on reproduction (as can be seen in the
Torelore episode with its pregnant king), the protagonists themselves are not
granted a genealogical future within the confines of the narrative, perhaps
making us question just what kind of future is really being proposed.23
Instead of a future predicated upon genealogy, as might be in line with the
concerns of the older generation, Aucassin et Nicolette arguably proposes a
future predicated upon the reconciliation of hedonism and futurity – essen-
20 Davies and Funke, ‘Introduction’ in Sex, Gender and Time, p. 3.

22 Verena Conley, ‘Appendix: An Exchange with Hélène Cixous’, in Hélène Cixous: Writing
the Feminine (Lincoln, NE, 1984), pp. 129–63 (p. 131).
23 This contrasts with similar medieval narratives involving both young lovers and/or
cross-cultural relationships: in the idyllic romance Floire et Blancheflor we are told that
the protagonists are the parents of Berte aux grands pieds (mother of Charlemagne) (vv.
9–12). In La Fille du Comte de Pontieu, the child of a Christian woman and Saracen Emir
is said to be the grandmother of Saladin. In this respect, the establishment of genealogy
is absent from Aucassin et Nicolette.
35
Victoria Turner
tially upon the acceptance of one’s place in time. When initially pressed by
his despairing parents to act in defence of his lands and people, Aucassin
petulantly responds in negatives, listing all the things he will not agree to
do unless his parents give him Nicolette.24 Aucassin’s demand expresses the
connection between assuming an adult role (as knight) and his need for
Nicolette, yet this request is rejected by his father, who suggests that if Auca-
ssin desires a wife, he can arrange a match with the daughter of some other
nobleman. Garin’s response may suggest that what is so problematic about
Aucassin’s refusal to become a knight is his specific love for, and attachment
to, Nicolette, rather than the desire to take a wife in general. In refusing to
grant Aucassin his request, Garin raises the issue of Nicolette’s past, saying
that:
ce est une caitive qui fu amenee d’es-
trange terre, si l’acata li visquens de ceste vile as
Sarasins, si l’amena en ceste vile, si l’a levee et bau-
tisie et faite sa fillole. (II, 30–3)
(she is a captive who was brought over from a foreign land. The viscount
of this town bought her from the Saracens and brought her here. He led
her to the baptismal font, baptized her and made her his goddaughter.)
He objects to Nicolette primarily as she is a slave who was purchased from

Saracens; such a status leaves Nicolette’s ancestry unclear, which makes her
temporally dislocated and thus unable to claim her own future. The evoca-
tion of the past by the previous generation is therefore a hindrance to the
production of a future. Perhaps the key point here is that Garin’s objections
are based solely upon the past, rather than upon Nicolette’s effect upon the
future. In this respect, Nicolette’s status as Saracen-turned-Christian does
not foreclose a reproductive future but a genealogical past, which is no
less based on continuity of blood and physical replication but which differs
from the focus on the child as explored by Edelman. While the disavowal
of the temporally subsequent leaves a sense of hopelessness in Edelman’s
work, in Aucassin et Nicolette the foreclosure of the past in fact places the
entire focus upon the future – on renewal and change, maintaining hope and
offering possibilities. Additionally, by underlining her foreign origins here,
Garin has also spatially dislocated Nicolette, and he contrasts the repeated
‘ceste vile’ (this town) with the unnamed ‘estrange terre’ (foreign land) of
Nicolette’s birth. Garin’s comments are countered by Aucassin, who argues
against the prioritization of territorially bestowed identity by claiming that
even to be the Empress of Constantinople or Germany, the Queen of France
or England would not be honour enough to match his lover’s nobility (II,
24 See récit II, 25–9.
36
40–4). Aucassin’s words therefore place Nicolette beyond both spatially and
temporally oriented social hierarchy.
By the close of the first récit, it thus appears that Aucassin has temporally
dislocated himself from his family in the name of love and that Nicolette has
been both temporally and spatially dislocated. These dislocations, however,
are not occasioned by their gender but by their asynchronicity with those
around them. Significantly, Nicolette is also physically absent from the text
during the preliminary discussions of Aucassin’s inactivity; she is described
at length by Garin, Aucassin’s mother, Aucassin himself and her godfather
the viscount before actually appearing in the text in the third verse section.
As the focus of every conversation in the first four sections of the tale, récit
and verse, she is given a somewhat legendary status as the obstacle to Aucas-
sin’s assumption of his dutiful role. In this respect, it is as if Nicolette’s past
is what produces this period of queer time, in the sense that it produces
heterogeneous experiences of time split across the generations.25
It is not just temporal priorities that differ across generations in this text,
but that the young couple are caught within a period of youthful pleasure
seeking at the start of the tale, perhaps most clearly shown in Aucassin’s
heaven-and-hell speech to the viscount: ‘En paradis qu’ai je a faire? Je n’i
quier entrer,/ mais que j’aie Nicolete ma tresdouce amie que j’aim/ tant’
(What would I do in paradise? As long as I have Nicolette, my sweet love
who I love so much I’m not interested in going there). Rather than heed the
viscount’s warning that he will go to hell if he makes Nicolette his mistress,
in this speech, Aucassin goes on to underscore that he would rather go to
hell with all the beautiful and glorious dead than go to heaven with all the
old and boring people, as long as Nicolette is there beside him. Tony Hunt
has suggested that this speech is an example not so much of parody but of
paradox. While elevating Nicolette once more, it nonetheless shows a certain
contradiction in Aucassin’s character: what would be the point of giving up
heaven for Nicolette when he does not wish to go there?26 The gesture would
be rather meaningless. In this light, Aucassin’s apparent desire for instant
gratification over long-term peace seems to expose the contradiction in his
character rather than youthful ignorance, namely, that he is simultaneously
devoted and generous yet meaningless in his professions of love. Is it really
his love for Nicolette that must therefore change or his own illogical thought
processes? Roger Pensom draws a contrast here between the behaviour of the
child and of the adult, since
25 Maria Rosa Menocal, ‘Signs of the Times: Self, Other and History in Aucassin et
Nicolette’, Romanic Review 80 (1989), 497–511 (500) notes that Nicolette is the cause of
generational conflict and that her origins are the obstacle to their match.
26 Tony Hunt, ‘La Parodie médiévale: le cas d’Aucassin et Nicolette’, Romania 100 (1979),
341–81 (360–3).
37
Victoria Turner
in his pre-moral identification of Pleasure with Good and Pain with Evil,
[Aucassin] asserts the pleasure-seeking nature of the child against that of the
adult for whom the deferral of libidinal gratification is a pre-condition of stable
social structure.27
Yet I propose that what is at stake in Aucassin et Nicolette is not a binary

temporal division between child and adult, but a presentation of time that
changes along with the travels of the protagonists. By extension, the change-
ability of the temporal experience in the text is perhaps a means of showing
the ridiculousness of a system focused entirely upon immediate pleasure or
solely on long-term gain and of showing that man’s experience of time is
paradoxically a simultaneous sentience of the moment and interest in the
future. The protagonists must thus acknowledge and overcome the expira-
tion date to their relationship by balancing competing temporal demands. In
contrast with Pensom’s psychoanalytic treatment of Aucassin et Nicolette, I do
not draw a divide between the suppression of pleasure required of the adult
and the ‘id’ of the child, but instead seek to demonstrate through a focus on
temporal experience that no such simple binary exists.
Before moving to the travels undertaken by the protagonists, it is helpful
to look a little more closely at the temporal experiences of Aucassin and
Nicolette in relation to their gender as well as their age. While Aucassin is
shown to be paralysed by his love for Nicolette, Nicolette’s forced spatial
dislocation incites her to activity. When we first encounter her imprisoned in
a tower by her godfather, she is already planning her escape, declaring that
‘longement n’i serai mie, se jel puis far[e]’ (I will not be here for long if I
can help it) (V, 24–5). Aucassin, on the other hand, when imprisoned by his
family, immediately sets about lamenting his lost love and resigns himself to
death (XI). Physically, the two possess very similar attributes,28 and though
their behaviour clearly separates them, the differences are not consistent.
One such example of this inconsistency can be seen in the events occurring
between Nicolette’s decision to flee and her visit to Aucassin in prison. In
contrast to Pensom, who once again draws a division between child and
adult,29 I suggest that the two attitudes presented by the protagonists signal
a constant need to evaluate the moment in relation to the future. When
imprisoned, Nicolette simultaneously acknowledges her love for Aucassin
and considers what will happen if the count discovers her (XII, 7–11). Like-
wise, when making her escape, she decides to risk the inevitable injuries she
will sustain in the process rather than risk being caught the next day (XVI,
12–16). Aucassin similarly conjoins thoughts of the present and future. While
27 Pensom, Aucassin et Nicolete, p. 31.

28 See récit XII, 20–1 for Nicolette’s features and récit II, 12–14 for Aucassin’s physical
description.
29 Pensom, Aucassin et Nicolete, pp. 52–3.
38
imprisoned he enjoys a lingering memory of Nicolette, effectively pausing the
narrative to indulge in his fantasy.30 Yet he is also very aware of the possible
future for Nicolette, since he fears that she will sleep with another man when
she leaves. This possibility, he says, would leave him with no other option but
death (XIV, 4–15). From this perspective, Aucassin could be seen to voice the
importance of their sexual bond for his future: just as her love could sustain
him, it is also what may cause him to end his life.
However, it is not only Aucassin’s long-term future that relies upon Nico-
lette but also his short-term pleasure. After Nicolette has left, Aucassin is
released from prison and his father attempts to console him with a celebra-
tion, which he is, however, left unable to enjoy, due to Nicolette’s absence
(XX, 17–18). He cannot live in the moment without Nicolette, which prompts
a knight who has suffered from a similar sickness to intervene. The knight
speaks to Aucassin in terms of futures, encouraging him to act:
Montés sor un ceval, fait il, s’alés selonc cele
forest esbanoiier; si verrés ces flors et ces herbes,
s’orrés ces oisellons canter; par aventure orrés tel
parole dont mix vos iert. (XX, 25–28)
(get on a horse, he said, and go and distract yourself along this forest’s edge;
there you will see flowers and grasses and hear the little birds sing; you may
chance to hear something that will do you good.)
Aucassin follows the knight’s advice, literally departing in search of his future.
In this respect, while they are separated, we see that the temporal relation-
ship of the couple is heterogeneous rather than demonstrative of a linear
process of maturation and seems to continually pit the inevitable end of the
relationship against their love for one another. If in one moment Aucassin
focuses on his end and Nicolette thinks to the future, it is Aucassin who later
envisages the likely result of Nicolette’s travels abroad and the hypothetical
impact upon him, whereas Nicolette simply resolves to leave without further
forethought. If gender does not definitively divide them, for both protago-
nists the physical displacements undergone can provoke shifts in temporal
30 Tu passas devant son lit,

Si soulevas ton train
Et ton peliçon ermin,
La cemisse de blanc lin,
Tant que ta ganbete vit (XI, 22–26)
(you passed before his bed and lifted the train of your dress, your ermine coat and
your white linen shirt so that he could see your little leg).
This fantasy is discussed by Sarah Kay, ‘Genre, Parody and Spectacle in Aucassin et
Nicolette and Other Short Comic Tales’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval
French Literature, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge, 2008), p. 169. There
is also a similar passage in VII, 13–16 where Aucassin imagines seeing Nicolette kiss
him and speak to him.
39
Victoria Turner
experience. The promise of a future is thus what spurs Aucassin to set off
in search of his love, with travel providing an alternative way of ordering
one’s life.
As he searches for Nicolette, Aucassin encounters a herdsman who has
lost one of his animals and who reminds Aucassin of the unpredictability
of life: ‘car avoirs va et vient: se j’ai or perdu, je gaaignerai une autre fois,
si sorrai mon buef quant je porrai’ (wealth comes and goes; if I have lost
out now, another time I will gain and I will pay for my ox when I can)
(XXIV, 62–4). Given the manner in which Aucassin left Beaucaire, such an
encounter may suggest that what Aucassin is beginning to learn is to think
for the future. The message seems to be that he should have hope and act
upon his desires rather than allow them to paralyse him. In this light, I
suggest that the text seems to use the protagonists’ experiences of time as a
way to explore their gender identities and to suggest that maturation may not
be a single straightforward trajectory. Furthermore, the travels undertaken
are crucial to these experiences of time. Reminiscent perhaps of teenage
angst, Aucassin’s separation from Nicolette and subsequent passive lamenta-
tions provide temporary suspensions of time in the narrative. The result is a
youthful period of queer experimentation with heterogeneous temporalities
sustained by spatial relocations.
While Beaucaire appears to be a coherent topographic entity, as under-
lined by Pensom, the travels of the protagonists also take them through
unnamed, wild regions to the sea.31 In verse section XXVII Aucassin says
that he does not care where the lovers go as long as Nicolette is with him,
giving the impression that their love has now disconnected them from spatial
considerations, as well as the temporal bounds discussed above. At this stage
they do not deny just the need for their relationship to end but also the need
to belong to an environment. It is also significant that there is no specific
sense of time expressed in this stage of the journey, other than the state-
ment that one day they arrive at the sea. Here the youngsters are thus not
only dislocated from their past through the absence of the older generation,
but also dislocated from a future, as they have no sense of duration or the
passing of time. Even when the pair actually reside in the absurd land of
Torelore, time seems to stand still, as we are simply told that ‘Aucassins fu
el castel de Torelore, et Nicolete s’amie, a grant aise et a grant deduit’ (Auca-
ssin passed comfortable and pleasant days at Torelore castle with Nicolette
his love) (XXXIV, 1–2); while the perfect tense here may suggest a sense of
duration, there is no suggestion of activity for Aucassin and Nicolette whilst
in this foreign land – just existence.
Throughout the episode in Torelore, changes in the active and passive roles
40
of the protagonists occur, as has often been noted,32 suggesting that gender
may be based upon proximity and movement if not dictated by temporal
attitudes. Aucassin speaks to the sailors at the outset of their journey, taking
the initiative, and he dominantly leads Nicolette along by the hand. Nicolette
is also notably silent here; the only time that she speaks whilst in Torelore
is in verse XXXIII, where she tells the people of Torelore that no activity
interests her when Aucassin embraces her. The physical closeness of Auca-
ssin thus distances her from the world around her, whereas we saw that
when the couple were spatially separated in Beaucaire, Aucassin was the
one dislocated. Nicolette also complains that the people of Torelore call her
‘fole’ (crazy) (XXXIII, 3) for this reaction, demonstrating that for her, spatial
dislocation to this timeless, nonsense realm has also led to her social dislo-
cation; love has now placed her in an atemporal zone disconnected from
the activities around her. Nevertheless, Nicolette may marry Aucassin only
once she has rectified her temporal dislocation by journeying back to her
origins, spatially relocating the self in the process. It is also only when once
again separated from Aucassin that the active Nicolette found in Beaucaire
re-emerges. Her temporal repositioning within a patrilineal genealogy allows
her to construct an alternative future when she disguises herself as a jongleur
and blackens her face to return to France:
She reconstructs the transmission of her culture from East to West, and in the
process she re-enacts her own history, both by repeating the journey, and by
acting out the stereotypes held by the older generation.33
Although she repeats her journey across cultures, Nicolette now does so
actively, as a man, as opposed to passively as a female slave; when she breaks
with her family (who wish her to marry a pagan nobleman), she mirrors
Aucassin’s own act of temporal severance with which their journey began.
At the point where the lovers are thus physically separated the most, with
Aucassin in Beaucaire and Nicolette in Cartage, Nicolette appears not only at
her most masculine, but also as most similar to Aucassin, rejecting the expec-
tations of her parents. This is also the moment in which the expiration date
of the relationship is challenged, since her past is rediscovered and rejected,
leaving the couple’s future clear of looming impediments. There is thus a
certain symmetry in this episode, since, while Aucassin had to reject his
familial obligations and become most passive while in Beaucaire, Nicolette
must now also reject her obligations and instead become most independent
while in Cartage. Just as Aucassin rejected the futuristic focus of his elders
32 See for instance M. Faith McKean, ‘Torelore and Courtoisie’, Romance Notes 3 (1961–2),
64–8.
33 Marla Segol, ‘Medieval Cosmopolitanism and the Saracen–Christian Ethos’, CLCWeb:
Comparative Literature and Culture, 6.2 (2004), http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol6/
iss2/4 (accessed 19 November 2012), 1–12 (9).
41
Victoria Turner
in favour of his need for instant gratification, so it is the promise of marriage
that Nicolette must reject (‘elle n’avoit cure de marier’ [she did not wish to
marry] (XXXVIII, 10–11)) and that drives her to flee Cartage. While it might
be tempting to see Nicolette’s cross-dressing and this moment of similarity
between the protagonists as problematizing gender and challenging their
future heterosexual union, the specific choice of a jongleur disguise actually
seems to resist such an interpretation in this text. It renders the similarity
between the lovers ephemeral, due to the fluid role and nature of the jongleur:
he may continually tell and retell the same tale as needed, while his likely
wanderings allow for repetitions before new audiences in new realms. This
disguise thus allows Nicolette to unite the moment of the tale’s events with its
narration, blurring temporal boundaries as well as those of gender and race
and providing an alternative form of repetition – or reproduction – to that
of biological descent. In the move from Cartage to Beaucaire, adolescence is
thus extended through a period of spatial relocation in a manner that allows
the protagonists to unite short-term pleasure and long-term stability.
Lynn Ramey comments that ‘through [Nicolette’s] movement back in time
[…] she may integrate herself with the French present’.34 Yet I would extend
this to suggest that in fact, what the movements of both Aucassin and Nico-
lette ensure is an alternative future that recognizes the heterogeneity of time.
In Aucassin’s case, Pensom suggests that he was a ‘topsy-turvy’ figure in the
chivalric feudal world who ‘reverts to the canonical pattern of domination
by a masterful soldier of an obedient woman’ while in Torelore.35 As we have
seen, however, Aucassin’s status as misfit is perhaps more to do with his
asynchronicity than with gendered behaviour. In Torelore, Aucassin moves
from being the passive adolescent languishing due to the intensity of his
love, to being active in the moment yet disavowing futurity as determined by
paternity (seen in his beating of the king). This beating of the child-bearing
king could be seen not as a commentary on effeminacy, as Gilbert reminds
us,36 but, given the emphasis upon competing experiences of time that we
have seen in this text, as a rejection of a backwards-looking system of repro-
duction. The king underlines to Aucassin that he will remain in bed until
his month of recuperation is over, at which point he will go to hear mass as
his ‘anc[estre]’ (ancestors) did and take up his war once more (XXIX, 9–15).
Aucassin’s response is to exact a promise from the king that a man of that
realm will never again lie in childbed (‘d’enfant ne gerra’; XXX, 9). The king
here seems caught in a passivity imposed by the weight of a tradition where
reproduction is the guarantor not of futurity but of history. The continuity
34 Lynn Tarte Ramey, Christian, Saracen and Genre in Medieval French Literature (New
York and London, 2001), p. 78.
36 See Gilbert, ‘The Practice of Gender’ for a detailed discussion of the king of Torelore’s
pregnancy, especially 218–22.
42
that reproduction would ensure is rendered meaningless, given the fact that
it is, of course, impossible for the male body to bear and birth a child; preg-
nancy itself thus provides a moment of queer time, and the emphasis upon
past lineage that accompanies it echoes the concerns of Aucassin’s parents
yet simultaneously overturns them in its inanity. While Edelman sees homo-
sexuality as exposing the fantasy of continuity represented by the child, in
Aucassin et Nicolette it is temporal normativity that is exposed as fantasy by
the act of procreation.
Significantly, therefore, it appears that moments of queer time are not
tied to specific gender identities or behaviour. The gender identities of the
lovers Aucassin and Nicolette alter according to their spatial coordinates,
with Nicolette appearing most masculine and Aucassin most passive while
they are separated from each other, but when they are physically united in
Torelore this is reversed.37 The instability of gender means that it does not
determine their experiences of time, resulting not in specific ‘male’ time or
‘female’ time, but in heterogeneous experiences of time. Contact with other
cultures through travel may thus prompt changes in gendered behaviour,
but does not necessarily involve the discovery of masculinity or femininity
in this text. Instead, the temporal disconnection from the older generation
achieved by the spatial dislocation of the protagonists allows them to forge
their own future based upon their shared journey rather than shared origins.
In fact, the dislocation between generations ultimately ensures that temporal
continuity be maintained through marriage of the hero into a higher social
class, with the potential for heirs and for inheritance of lands abroad.
Aucassin et Nicolette presents a period of queer time in the lives of its
protagonists. From the outset, time in this text is non-linear, as narrative
past and present exist simultaneously and Aucassin’s preference for present
pleasure over future heavenly peace contrasts with the entreaties of his parents
and their recourse to lineage and lines of descent, questions of parody aside.
Aucassin’s future actions are continuously motivated by fleeting but repeated
moments of physical pleasure with Nicolette (such as kisses), while Nicolette
constantly weighs her present situation in relation to future possibilities.
Moments depicting Aucassin’s passivity and Nicolette’s activity could there-
fore be read not as a gender troubling, but as a way of exposing competing
experiences of time, of revealing the necessity of acting on impulse yet also of
making plans, and of experiencing pleasure in the moment without compro-
mising the value of marriage. In short, this means overcoming the ‘expira-
tion date’ to their pleasure imposed by their backwards-looking elders yet
achieving a union that has reconciled concerns for the past, present and
future. While fluidly gendered behaviour is thus a side-effect rather than
37 Gender in the Torelore episode is nonetheless problematic when parody enters the
frame. See Gilbert, ‘The Practice of Gender’, especially her comments on p. 226, n. 7.
43
Victoria Turner
a cause of such temporal heterogeneity, the older generations constantly
threaten to pull the couple into the past, as seen in their focus on lineage
and history. Yet, as we saw with the king of Torelore, too heavy a focus on
past traditions can lead to inactivity and to a paternity that is restrictive
in its senseless circularity rather than productive. Instead, the very viability
of Aucassin and Nicolette’s relationship lies in the fact that it maintains a
forward-looking focus: futurity is not denied in this example of queer time,
in contrast to Edelman’s formulation discussed above.
Multiple experiences of time do not mean, however, that the couple
suddenly become adults at the end of the text and leave behind a period
of youth, as we are left with a sense that pleasure in longevity has finally
been discovered, the pairing of ‘dis’ (days) and ‘delis’ (pleasure) explic-
itly expressing this at the end of the text: ‘puis vesquirent il mains dis/ et
menerent lor delis’ (and so they lived out their many days in happiness)
(XLI, 20–1). Furthermore, rather than being the result of aging or maturing
through linear temporal progression, the reconciliation of instant gratifica-
tion and longevity has occurred thanks to the travels undergone by Auca-
ssin and Nicolette. When Aucassin follows Nicolette away from Beaucaire,
he literally chases his future while also pursuing short-term pleasure over
long-term stability for his kingdom: the loss of Nicolette precludes not only
his short-term pleasure in distractions, but even his long-term existence. In
Torelore, Nicolette is conversely engrossed by Aucassin and must later forge
her own future in Cartage.
At the end of the text, dressed as a (male) jongleur, Nicolette sings to
Aucassin of their own story, emphasizing the continuousness and even atem-
poral nature of their love. In this respect, her rejection of her pagan past
and marriage to Aucassin become one and the same, so that marriage, if not
necessarily the production of children, is the guarantor of futurity yet also
the means of finding pleasure in the short-term. When singing to Aucassin
back in Beaucaire, she explains that Nicolette would marry none other than
Aucassin, in contrast to her assertion to her family that she did not wish to
marry at all. The singing of their own history, presenting a tale within a tale,
is what unites them in their common rejection of a single temporality;38 it
is a moment where experiences of gender, class, space and time blur. This is
a union based not upon origins, generational expectations or gender norms
but upon the creation of their own time: a time where the expiration date to
their relationship is denied through marriage and an alternative continuity
is produced, where responsibilities must be accepted yet desire proactively
chased, and where differences of character or even gender do not expire but
exist in a coeval state.
38 Even here, Nicolette is of course aware of their present proximity, while Aucassin is
left to remember his lost love (XXXIX, 7) and in récit XL Aucassin underlines that his
own past, present and future are determined by Nicolette, as he will marry no other.
44
3
Remembering Birth in Thirteenth- and

Fourteenth-Century England
Fiona Harris-Stoertz
L ate thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century English ‘proof of age’ records

provide an intriguing glimpse into the often complex interactions of
gender, time and memory in medieval society, revealing how women’s stories
helped to create and shape the collective memory of medieval communi-
ties – something also posited by Patricia Skinner in the first essay in this
volume. These documents record the statements of male jurors regarding
the age of an heir to lands held directly from the crown, requiring the men
to recall events anywhere from fourteen to twenty-one years in the past. On
the surface, men, as the members of the community who were recognized as
viable witnesses and whose words were recorded in Latin prose by male royal
officials – women could not serve as jurors – were situated as the holders
and creators of community memory. In fact, though, throughout their depo-
sitions, men continually referred to the words, activities, experiences and
memories of women in their community – wives, kin and neighbours. This
was particularly true of men’s recollections of births, which were frequently
called upon to establish the age of an heir. Thus these sources serve as a
reminder, as Elisabeth van Houts has suggested, of how often women’s stories
lurk beneath the surface of what appear to be documents written from an
exclusively masculine perspective.1
This essay focuses on how memories of birth, as recorded in proofs of
age, were socially constructed by both male and female members of medieval
communities. The memories that were recorded in the individual depositions
of jurors were rarely the product of an individual alone, but most often the
result of the intricate workings of the collective memory of the commu-
nity, consisting of numerous social interactions and conversations within the
community. While men were very much part of the rich tapestry of social
interactions surrounding birth, their memories of births in the community
1 Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto,
1999), p. 2.
45
Fiona Harris Stoertz
also reflected the stories of women who attended births and took part in
more exclusively female rituals.
Proofs of age, part of the Inquisitions Post Mortem, are records of inquests
into the age of heirs to lands held directly from the king.2 In the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, although the lands of important families were
usually passed on through inheritance, most were technically held from the
king in return for specified services. Thus, when a tenant of lands held from
the king died, royal officials made formal inquiry into which lands the tenant
held, what the obligatory services were and who the heir should be. If the
heir was a minor – under twenty-one for a boy, under sixteen for an unmar-
ried girl or under fourteen for a married girl – the king received wardship or
custody of the heir, a very profitable practice. Wardship was usually granted
or sold to families who controlled the person, lands and often the marriage
of the heir, until he or she came of age. In order for heirs to take personal
possession of their lands, their age had to be officially established.3 As there
were no official birth records in England until the sixteenth century, from
at least the 1180s the age of heirs was determined through the testimony of
a jury of men from the community surrounding the heir’s lands who could
be expected to be familiar with this information. Jurors came from various
levels of society and included servants. While initially jurors simply gave a
collective opinion, from the reign of Edward I and throughout the remainder
of the Middle Ages, records usually included the testimonies of individual
jurors, who were asked the age of the heir, the place and date of birth and
baptism, names of the godparents and how the juror knew this information.
2 The Inquisitions Post Mortem are stored in The National Archives in Kew, UK. Most
have been translated and calendared in Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and Other
Analogous Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office, 23 vols (London, 1904–55).
I have cited the calendared version (IPM) in most cases, as it is more easily accessible
to most readers, but have consulted the originals at The National Archives in most
cases, and cite the Latin originals when I feel the precise word choice is important.
3 For discussions of proofs of age, see Sue Sheridan Walker, ‘Proof of Age of Feudal Heirs
in Medieval England’, Mediaeval Studies 35 (1973), 306–23; John Bedell, ‘Memory and
Proof of Age in England 1272–1327’, Past and Present 162 (1999), 4–12; Becky R. Lee, ‘A
Company of Women and Men: Men’s Recollections of Childbirth in Medieval England’,
Journal of Family History 27.2 (2002), 92–100 and ‘Men’s Recollections of a Women’s
Rite: Medieval English Men’s Recollections Regarding the Rite of the Purification of
Women after Childbirth’, Gender & History 14.2 (2002), 224–41. For proofs of age in
Wales, see Llinos Beverly Smith, ‘Proofs of Age in Medieval Wales’, Bulletin of the
Board of Celtic Studies/Bwletin y Bwrdd Gwybodau Celtaidd 38 (1991), 134–44. For
detail about wardship and the marriage of heirs, see Scott L. Waugh, The Lordship
of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics, 1217–1327
(Princeton, NJ, 1988); Sue Sheridan Walker, ‘The Feudal Family and the Common Law
Courts: the Pleas Protecting Rights of Wardship and Marriage, c. 1225–1375’, Journal
of Medieval History 14 (1988), 13–31; and Sue Sheridan Walker, ‘Free Consent and
Marriage of Feudal Wards in Medieval England’, Journal of Medieval History 8 (1982),
123–34.
46
Remembering Birth
The answers were often recorded in considerable detail, including stories
about community life, allowing us to see how these men thought about and
remembered birth.
The development of this procedure can be seen as part of what Michael
Clanchy has called the transition ‘from memory to written record’ during the
High Middle Ages.4 In this period, literacy was growing rapidly and there
was an evolving interest in and reliance on written records, which could
be used to establish rights, privileges and obligations, previously preserved
only by custom. Religious and secular leaders accumulated bureaucracies
of literate officials who recorded transactions and increasingly demanded
written evidence from other members of society. What is fascinating in this
procedure of determining age is that it rested on the assumption that adult
male members of the community would be interested in and knowledgeable
about the birth of children born in the community, and would have memories
that could be used to determine the ages of heirs. Of course, families holding
land directly from the king usually were wealthy and prominent members
of society, the births of whose heirs were important to the neighbourhood
and thus memorable events. Likewise, the process of determining an indi-
vidual’s age, by its nature, placed an emphasis on the individual’s birth. Still,
it is evident from the proof of age records that births and the community
celebrations surrounding birth held an important place in medieval society.
Proofs of age as a source are not without difficulties. The records are
in Latin, a language probably unknown to most jurors, who, depending on
their identity or location, might have testified in any one of several different
languages. Thus, we do not have the exact words of jurors. Likewise, the
ages of jurors have a suspicious tendency to end in zero, and it has been
pointed out by a number of historians that the testimonies of jurors, particu-
larly those from the later Middle Ages, are sometimes formulaic and may
not always reflect real memories.5 Members of the community also had a
vested interest in pleasing the wealthy landowners of the neighbourhood,
4 Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066 to 1307, 2nd edn
(Oxford, 1993).
5 R. C. Fowler, ‘Legal Proofs of Age’, English Historical Review 22.85 (1907), 101–3; M.
T. Martin, ‘Legal Proofs of Age’, English Historical Review 22.87 (1907), 526–7; A. E.
Stamp, ‘Legal Proofs of Age’, The English Historical Review 29.114 (1914), 323–4; and
C. D. Ross, Review of Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and other Analogous
Documents, Edward III, vol. xiii (1370–1373), vol. xiv (1374–1377), The English Historical
Review 72.282 (1957), 110–11, offer persuasive demonstrations of the tendency for
proofs to be formulaic and probably fabricated in some cases. Martin offers a few
early-fourteenth-century examples of problematic proofs of age, but most are later.
Ages of jurors are certainly approximate in many cases. Bedell, ‘Memory and Proof
of Age’, 5–12, while admitting that problematic entries can be found, argues that the
records do, for the most part, record actual memories. See also R. F. Hunnisett, ‘The
Reliability of Inquisitions as Historical Evidence’, in The Study of Medieval Records:
Essays in Honour of Kathleen Major, ed. Donald A. Bullough and R. L. Storey (Oxford,
47
and probably sometimes invented details that would prove the heir’s case.
Still, there is little evidence of stock responses in my period of focus, the
late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and, moreover, I would argue
that even stock responses needed to appear believable, and thus tell us much
about the mental habits and assumptions of the community.
Proofs of age have been mined successfully by many historians, partic-
ularly for specific genealogical and biographical information, but also for
details about baptism, activities of adolescents, longevity and generations.6
Most germane to this study are the works of John Bedell and Becky Lee.
Lee, examining a broader span of records, has focused especially on details
of birth revealed by the records, arguing that women in childbirth were
supported by a ‘full company of men and women’, as the proofs show men
were interested and involved in the events of the birth chamber, even though
they rarely witnessed childbirth directly.7 She has also used proofs of age
to suggest that men were heavily invested in the practices surrounding the
rite of purification.8 Bedell looks more broadly at personal memories – the
events jurors used to help them remember the year of the birth – focusing
on records from the time of Edward I and Edward II, but omitting recollec-
tions directly associated with the birth of the heir or rituals surrounding it.
He finds that personal life events, such as death, marriage and particularly
the birth of members of their own families, were the reference points most
often used by medieval people to remember ages of heirs, not things like
political events or natural disasters.9
My approach lies between that of Bedell and Lee. I have chosen to focus
on the records of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries partly
because, as Bedell argues, these are rather less formulaic than later proofs,
but also because this fits the time-frame of my ongoing larger study of high-
medieval birth. My focus in this essay is not, as Lee’s is, the births themselves,
1971), pp. 206–35, for a general discussion of problems with the reliability of late-
medieval inquisition records, focusing mainly on coroner’s inquisitions.
6 See for example Joel T. Rosenthal, ‘Three-Generation Families: Searching for Grandpa
and Grandma in Late Medieval England’, in Medieval Family Roles: A Book of Essays,
ed. Cathy Jorgensen Itnyre (New York and London, 1996), pp. 225–37; M. A. Jonker,
‘Estimation of Life Expectancy in the Middle Ages’, Journal of the Royal Statistical
Society 166.1 (2003), 105–17; Louis Haas, ‘Social Connections between Parents and
Godparents in Late Medieval Yorkshire’, in Studies on the Personal Name in Later
Medieval England and Wales, ed. Dave Postles and Joel T. Rosenthal (Kalamazoo, MI,
2006), pp. 159–75; B. Gregory Bailey, Meaghan E. Bernard, Gregory Carrier, Cherise
L. Elliott, John Langdon, Natalie Leishman, Michal Mlynarz, Oksana Mykhed and
Lindsay C. Sidders, ‘Coming of Age and the Family in Medieval England’, Journal of
Family History 33.1 (2008), 41–60.
7 Lee, ‘Company’, 92–100.
8 Lee, ‘Women’s Rite’, 224–41.
9 Bedell, ‘Memory and Proof of Age’, 3–27.
48
Remembering Birth
but instead the ways in which memories of birth were socially constructed
by communities – how the experiences of women became the memories of
men.10
The jurors interrogated to determine the age of an individual were all
male and would not usually have been present at the actual birth, but in a
remarkable number of cases they used memories associated with birth – that
of the heir and that of their own families – as a way of recalling the heir’s
current age. While it could be argued that an investigation into age would
naturally encourage a focus on birth in the proofs, it is nevertheless striking
to what extent in the narratives of the proofs of ages memories of births
were woven into the social life of the community. Births were remembered
first and foremost by their association with saints’ days or other religious
feasts that would have been important events in the life of the community.
They were also remembered because of the interactions of jurors with those
present at births and the participation of jurors in important community
rituals associated with birth, including the public ceremonies of baptism or
purification (or witnessing the processions associated with baptism), celebra-
tory feasts held by the families of the new infant and visits of neighbours
to mother and child during the lying-in period. Jurors likewise, as Bedell
suggests, recalled the date of a birth through its proximity to the births of
10 See Lee, ‘Company’, 92–100. Numerous authors have touched on pregnancy and
childbirth in the period I discuss. Some of the most important are: Peter Biller,
‘Childbirth in the Middle Ages’, History Today 36 (1986), 42–9; Shulamith Shahar,
Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York, 1990), pp. 32–52; Gail McMurray
Gibson, ‘Scene and Obscene: Seeing and Performing Late Medieval Childbirth’, Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29.1 (1999), 7–24; Monica Green, ‘Women’s
Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe’, in Women’s Healthcare in
the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (Aldershot, 2000), I, pp. 39–78, and Making
Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology
(Oxford, 2008); Fiona Harris-Stoertz, ‘Suffering and Survival in Medieval English
Childbirth’, in Medieval Family Roles, ed. Cathy Jorgensen Itnyre (New York and
London, 1996), pp. 101–20 and ‘Pregnancy and Childbirth in Chivalric Literature’,
Mediaevalia: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Medieval Studies Worldwide 29.1 (2008),
27–36; Sylvie Laurent, Naître au moyen âge: de la conception à la naissance: la grossesse
et l’accouchement (XIIe–XVe siècle) (Paris, 1989); Carole Rawcliffe, ‘Women, Childbirth,
and Religion in Later Medieval England’, in Women and Religion in Medieval England,
ed. Diana Wood (Oxford, 2003), pp. 91–117; Pierre André Sigal, ‘La Grossesse,
l’accouchement et l’attitude envers l’enfant mort-né à la fin du moyen âge d’après les
récits de miracles’, in Santé, médecine et assistance au moyen âge (Paris, 1987), pp.
23–41; R. C. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval
Miracles (New York, 1997), pp. 17–42; Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Women
Born: Representations of Caesarian Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Ithaca,
NY and London, 1990); Jacqueline Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in
Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT, 1999); Ginger Lee Guardiola, ‘Within and Without:
The Social and Medical Worlds of the Medieval Midwife, 1000–1500’, unpublished PhD
thesis, University of Colorado, 2002.
49
children in their own families or other significant life events such as marriage
and death, and often the narratives of births in other families were woven
into that of the birth of the heir.
Male neighbours participated in the feasts, rituals, visits and gift-giving
associated with community births and sometimes heard the cries of mother
and child; however, the memories of jurors were not limited to direct experi-
ence. They also learned details from women who attended births, visited the
mother or served as godmothers, nurses or attendants. Men and women in
the proofs of age displayed themselves as eager for news of birth, gossiping
freely about pregnancies, labour and birth, and rewarding the bringers of
news about successful births with generous gifts. Thus, the memories of birth
found in the proofs are to a considerable degree the socially constructed
product of shared community activities, ideas and conversations.
Theorists of memory such as Maurice Halwbachs, James Fentress and Chris
Wickham suggest that all memories are to some degree collective or social
memories, constructed by participation in the activities of the community.
As Fentress and Wickham have argued, memory can be viewed as an expres-
sion of community experience in that ‘memory is structured by language,
by teaching and observing, by collectively held ideas, and by experiences
shared by others’.11 This is certainly true of the way all the testimonies use
the liturgical calendar to pinpoint the exact date of birth and baptism – for
example the day of St Dunstan12 – and it seems clear that the community
celebration of Church feasts provided important markers in the community’s
remembrance of births. Halbwachs likewise suggests that collective memory
is particularly strong in circumstances where people share work, celebrations
and distractions, something also true of medieval society.13
In the creation of collective memory, the participation of women must
not be ignored. Patrick Geary in his work on memory around the year 1000
argues that women were especially important in the preservation of family
memories, particularly the remembrance of the dead.14 Elisabeth van Houts,
in her book on gender and memory between 900 and 1200, suggests that
men and women collaborated in preserving history, particularly family histo-
ries, but demonstrates that men were reluctant to acknowledge women as
sources when history was written down, unless there were no available male
11 James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), esp. pp. 7 and 25.
12 IPM vol 4, no. 553.
13 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, IL
and London, 1992), esp. pp. 22, 23, 50, 53, 82. See also Rosamund McKitterick, Memory
and Identity in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004), for a study of collective elite
identity.
14 Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the
First Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1994), pp. 51ff.
50
Remembering Birth
witnesses.15 In the case of proofs of age, while women could not serve as
jurors, underlining the reluctance of authorities to use women as witnesses,
their actions and memories contributed substantially to the collective memo-
ries of the community, and jurors often referenced the activities and speech of
their wives, female relatives and neighbours. Female ‘authorities’ are perhaps
more apparent in the proofs of age than in most other sources of the time,
since only women usually attended births, and so they would have been more
valuable as sources of information.16
While this essay focuses on the construction of collective memory, I
do not want to claim that memories unique to an individual cannot exist.
Bedell demonstrates conclusively that personal milestones were important
aids to memory in the proofs of age.17 While marriages and deaths were often
mentioned, the most common personal markers were the births of the chil-
dren of the jurors or other close relatives. Many of the jurors were of similar
age to the fathers of the heirs and had children born at the same time. Jurors
commonly referred to the relative ages of their own offspring in recalling
the ages of heirs.18 Nevertheless, these personal memories were usually to
some extent tied to a larger social matrix of shared ideas and activities, if
only in the references to religious festivals that served as markers of birth.
Frequently the links between personal memory and collective memory were
more extensive. For example, one juror, Nicolas Ambroys, used the memory
of the birth of his daughter to help pinpoint the age of the heir, recalling that
‘his own wife lay in childbed when the said Geoffrey’s mother was churched,
and his daughter then born was of such an age last autumn’.19 Community
interaction clearly played a role in the formation of these personal memories,
as the witness was aware of the churching occurring in the community even
as his own wife gave birth.
While in most testimonies of witnesses to the age of an heir collective
memories, shaped by members of the community, both male and female,
are apparent to some extent, male witnesses sometimes provided evidence
of a birth through direct observation, although in no case did the jurors see
the child actually being born. Men rarely attended births in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, but they sometimes did have personal knowledge
of births, usually through their everyday activities in the community,20 and
15 van Houts, Memory and Gender, esp. p. 38.

16 Kathleen Quirk makes this point for Norman childbirth miracles in her essay, ‘Men,
Women and Miracles in Normandy, 1050–1150’, in Medieval Memories: Men, Women
and the Past, ed. Elisabeth van Houts (Harlow, 2001), p. 63 (pp. 53–71).
17 Bedell, ‘Memory and Proof of Age’, especially 16–17.
18 See for example IPM vol. 4, no. 116; vol. 5, no. 156.
19 IPM vol. 2, no. 697.
20 Gibson, ‘Scene and Obscene’, 7–24, esp. 9, argues that male entrance to the birthing
chamber was ‘strictly controlled and restricted’. Lee, ‘Company’, 92–100, demonstrates
51
several who, because of personal business, were at or near the house where
the birth was taking place and heard the cries of mother or child.21 John le
Frere, staying overnight at a manor, reported that he heard the new baby
‘wailing and his mother crying out so bitterly that he never heard such a
noise before or since’.22 Several other men visited a house near the time of
a birth and saw the newborn child in the cradle or heard members of the
household talking about the birth.23 One visited a house to discuss some
land and found the nurse and household discussing the birth.24 In another
case, a male servant accompanied grandparents of the heir on a formal visit
and thus learned details of the birth and viewed the baby.25 In one unusual
story, the chamberlain of the mother opened the door of her chamber so that
her husband could come in to speak with her while she was in labour, and
thus there were male witnesses to the woman’s labour.26 Again, men’s direct
knowledge of births tended to arise from their daily social interactions and
activities. Birth usually took place in the household and the household was
the centre of work, business and social interaction for both men and women.
A central paradox of the exclusive use of male jurors in English proofs
of age was that it was virtually always women, not men, who were present
at births and thus would have been in the best position to testify. Birth was
an important social event for women in English communities during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and apparently one that to some extent
cut across social ranks, as the proofs reveal that women of all social levels
attended births, from great ladies to servants. It appears to have been an
occasion where women gathered to lend their support and expertise to the
birthing mother, culminating, as we shall see, in a procession across the fields
with the baby to the church for its baptism. Thus men very often gained their
stories of births at second hand, through female family members, servants
and neighbours. As van Houts has argued for sources in earlier centuries,
that while men were rarely present at births, they had an influence on events and
were to some extent aware of and interested in them. Finucane, Rescue of the
Innocents, pp. 33–5, argues that men generally stayed outside the birthing chamber,
but were interested in events taking place there. Green, ‘Women’s Medical Practice’
(pp. 39–78) and Making Women’s Medicine Masculine (throughout, esp. pp. 70–117),
argues that men were never entirely excluded from healthcare relating to pregnancy
and childbirth, particularly in emergency situations and in the case of elites, although
routine childbirth would have been handled most often by women. For a few cases
of men who were present at births in this period, see Harris-Stoertz, ‘Suffering and
Survival’, p. 110.
21 IPM vol. 5, no. 228; vol. 6, no. 754.
22 IPM vol. 3, no. 151.
23 IPM vol. 4, no. 49; vol. 5, no. 355; vol. 6, nos 434, 435.
24 IPM vol. 4, no. 620.
25 IPM vol. 6, no. 123.
26 IPM vol. 3, no. 149.
52
Remembering Birth
in thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century proofs of age, women were very
often the creators of the stories that lay behind the official male narrative.27
This pattern is not unique to the proofs of age. With the rapid developments
of more sophisticated systems of inheritance law in France and England
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, details of birth – whether the
child was born alive, the order of multiple births etc. – became legally very
important, and in these cases too it was men who were asked to serve as
witnesses, although women would have had more complete knowledge of
the event.28
Most of the women attending births would not have been professionals.
The late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries were a transitional period,
where we find midwives beginning to appear more frequently in various
records, particularly in larger towns, but they are still relatively hard to find
in the records.29 In twelfth- and thirteenth- century courtly literature, for
example, midwives have very little place.30 In the proofs of age, midwives
are mentioned occasionally in the accounts of witnesses (the word obstetrix
27 van Houts, Memory and Gender, p. 2 and throughout.

28 Fiona Harris-Stoertz, ‘Pregnancy and Childbirth in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century
French and English Law’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 21.2 (2012), 263–81 (276).
Women were allowed to serve as expert witnesses in determining whether or not a
woman was pregnant. See for example IPM vol. 3, no. 361. Women served as proof
of age witnesses in parts of Southern France. See Joseph Shatzmiller, ed. Médecine et
justice en Provence médiévale: Documents de Manosque 1262–1348 (Aix-en-Provence,
1989), pp. 66–9. For a comprehensive discussion of arrangements in Manosque,
see Caley McCarthy, ‘Midwives, Medicine, and the Reproductive Female Body in
Manosque, 1289–1500’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Waterloo, 2011.
29 For a comprehensive account of early- and high-medieval birth attendants, see Fiona
Harris-Stoertz, ‘Midwives in the Middle Ages? Birth Attendants 600–1300’, in Medicine
and the Law in the Middle Ages, ed. Sara M. Butler and Wendy J. Turner (Leiden, 2014),
pp. 58–87. It has often been assumed by historians that midwives were the normal
birth attendants throughout the Middle Ages. For this view, see Biller, ‘Childbirth’,
42–9; Muriel Joy Hughes, ‘Medieval Midwives’, Women Healers in Medieval Life and
Literature (Freeport, NY, 1943), pp. 100–13; Laurent, Naître au moyen âge, pp. 172–9;
Guardiola, ‘Within and Without’, throughout. Recently, other historians, particularly
Monica Green, have questioned this assumption, pointing out that little evidence
of midwives being active during the early or high Middle Ages can be found, and
that most evidence for midwives comes from the later Middle Ages, particularly the
fifteenth century. They argue that midwifery, perhaps in response to ecclesiastical
concerns about baptism and rising population densities, re-emerged as a specialized
profession only in the thirteenth century, first in larger urban areas and only slowly
in smaller towns. See Kathryn Taglia, ‘Delivering a Christian Identity: Midwives in
Northern French Synodal Legislation, c. 1200–1500’, in Religion and Medicine in the
Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (York, 2001), pp. 77–90; Green, Making
Women’s Medicine Masculine, especially pp. 134–40. My own research supports the idea
that midwives probably were not common between 600 and 1100, but suggests that
they began to reappear in the twelfth century.
30 Harris-Stoertz, ‘Pregnancy and Childbirth in Chivalric Literature,’ 31–3.
53
is used) as having been present at births, but again this is relatively rare.31
Midwives usually appear to have been members of the community and occa-
sionally the kin of witnesses – for example in at least two cases the midwife
was the wife of one of the jurors.32 Other medical professionals are largely
absent from the proofs, although one witness recalled the age of the heir
because he had been sent to fetch a doctor for the mother.33
Whether a midwife was present or not, other female members of the
community – knowledgeable amateurs well-known to the woman – also
attended the birth. Such women presumably would have provided support
and comfort as well as practical assistance. That even important women
might be of practical assistance is suggested by the deposition of John de
Wycham:
On the day the heir was born, he went to Denham to see Lady Amice de Say,
with whom the heir’s mother was in company, about buying a certain marriage
from her, and found her so occupied about the heir’s mother that he returned
without doing anything, and on the third day after he returned and was present
at the baptism.34
There appears to have been a considerable range in the rank of birth attend-
ants. Some, like Lady Amice, appear to have been of high birth. Many wives
of jurors (who could be of various social levels) attended the mother during
birth, and some women present at the birth were also godmothers at the
baptism.35 Servants also attended, both those of the birthing mother and also
the servants of others in the neighbourhood.36 One juror commented that
he recalled a birth because his maid servant (ancilla) had attended it.37 It
may be that female friends sent particularly skilled servants to help mothers
through births. One woman of high rank sent her maid to a mother six
days before the birth with instructions to stay until after the birth.38 A male
servant sent with the maid, later called as juror, recalled this. Women from
the neighbourhood seem to have attended births in considerable numbers,
as male witnesses reported that they received their information about details
of births from their wives, mothers, neighbours and servants who attended
the mother in childbirth.39
31 See for example, The National Archives, C 133/40 (19).

32 IPM vol. 2, no. 553; vol. 5, no. 153; The National Archives, C 134/13 (5).
33 IPM vol. 6, no. 335; The National Archives, C 134/72 (1).
34 IPM vol. 3, no. 483.
35 For wives of jurors present at births, see IPM vol. 4, nos 55, 56, 435; vol. 5, nos 151,
541. For a godmother, see IPM vol. 2, no. 553.
36 IPM vol. 3, no. 434. In this case the servant was the mother of the juror.
37 The National Archives, C 133/52 (6).
38 IPM vol. 6, no. 124; The National Archives, C 134/60 (9).
39 For wives, see IPM vol. 5, no. 151; vol. 6, nos 200, 435. For mothers, see IPM vol.
54
Remembering Birth
Nursing arrangements, presumably arrangements directly involving
women, were also prominent in the memories of men. Often this was because
men had personal connections with the women who nursed the heir. These
might be their wives, their sisters, their daughters, their servants, their neigh-
bours or women who had nursed their own children before moving on to
the heir.40 Nurses appear to have been a prominent source of information
about heirs, spreading news about the child through the community.41 While
sometimes nurses resided in the home of the child, sometimes children went
to the homes of nurses (sometimes also the homes of jurors), where they
were seen by members of the community.42
It is striking how eager communities were to tell and hear information
about births. We have already seen that women present at the births, whether
as friends or official midwives, gossiped freely about the birth to their
husbands, sons, masters and neighbours.43 Memories of birth were created by
the community, not merely by a single individual. Word was spread rapidly
in every venue – at the tavern,44 in fields,45 at feasts,46 in church,47 in eyre
of justices,48 to people who came to buy timber or hay or deliver ale and
even at a burial.49 Fathers spread the glad tidings personally and sent out
messengers to broadcast the news.50 Such messengers were received with joy
and frequently were given rewards by recipients of their news.51 Many other
individuals appear to have simply taken it upon themselves to announce the
news, perhaps in the hope of reward. Kin in particular were often generous
in rewarding bearers of news about an heir. A butler was given land by
his master for bringing him news of the birth of a grandson.52 Another set
4, no. 434. For neighbours, see IPM vol. 2, no. 553; vol. 5, no. 539. For servants, see
IPM vol. 2, no. 697. See IPM vol. 2, no. 43 for a case where the juror says he received
information from the mother and nurse.
40 For wives, see IPM vol. 4, nos 55, 56; vol. 4, 435; vol. 5, nos 151, 541. For sisters, see
IPM vol. 5, no. 544. For a daughter, see IPM vol. 6, no. 195. For a servant, see IPM
vol. 6, no. 192. For neighbours, see IPM vol. 2, no. 734; vol. 3, no. 214. For a woman
who had nursed the juror’s children, see IPM vol. 3, no. 427.
41 See for example IPM vol. 3, no. 620.
42 IPM vol. 4, no. 56.
43 IPM vol. 4, no. 56.
44 IPM vol. 6, no. 754.
45 IPM vol. 4, no. 328.
46 IPM vol. 4, no. 436.
47 IPM vol. 3, no. 429.
48 IPM vol. 3, no. 487.
49 IPM vol. 5, no. 421; vol. 6, no. 190.
50 IPM vol. 3, no. 202.
51 IPM vol. 4, no. 436.
52 IPM vol. 3, no. 437.
55
of proud grandparents gave the messenger jewels worth 100s.53 It was not,
however, only kin who gave rewards for news of births. One juror recalled
that he gave the tailor of the heir’s father a measure of oats for sharing the
news of the boy’s birth.54 A butler got two shillings and a gold ring.55 Yet
another was given a sparrow-hawk.56 A steward was given gloves57 and two
servants were each given shoes.58 In another case, a knight gave the messenger
an overtunic, although another juror admitted that he merely thanked God
when he heard the news.59 In medieval society, birth was of interest to the
entire community. The sharing of ideas and information led to the creation
of collective memories. The giving of gifts often served to help an individual
to remember the birth, and thus was recorded in the proofs.
The communal rituals and festivals associated with birth, particularly
baptism, visits and gift-giving during a woman’s period of confinement, and
purification, were important both in spreading news of the birth and also
in creating memories that loomed large in men’s recollections of the age
of heirs. These were community celebrations, both religious and secular,
where the child was on display. They served to make important neighbours
aware of the birth, but they were also occasions for lavish displays of gener-
osity and hospitality that lingered in the memory of those who attended or
heard about them. Some rituals, like visits to the mother during her lying-in
period and feasts following the rite of purification, took place in the home,
but religious rituals, like baptism and the rite of purification, took place at
the local church, where they might be witnessed both by guests and chance
passers-by, particularly in the case of baptism. The church was a centre of
community life and jurors inadvertently saw ceremonies when they went
there to arrange for ceremonies for family members, get documents written,
bury family members, hear mass and borrow money from the rector.60 One
witness even saw a baptism while attempting to catch the murderer of one
of his servants.61
Baptism, usually performed on the day of or the day after the birth, was
one of the most important ceremonies associated with childbirth. Neces-
sary for salvation, it cleansed the child of sin and symbolically represented
the child’s entry into the community. Jurors were always asked the date of
baptism and the identity of the godparents, and the godfather, if alive and
53 IPM vol. 5, no. 157.

54 IPM vol. 2, no. 739.
55 IPM vol. 5, no. 152.
56 IPM vol. 6, no. 54.
57 IPM vol. 6, no. 123.
58 IPM vol. 6, no. 202.
59 IPM vol. 3, no. 149.
60 IPM vol. 5, nos 52, 151, 152, 228; vol. 6 nos 754, 756.
61 IPM vol. 5, no. 228.
56
Remembering Birth
findable, was usually one of the jurors and thus able to give his account of
lifting the child from the font.62 Likewise, women serving as godmothers
shared their experiences with sons and husbands, who recalled the stories
when they were asked to report the child’s age.63 While clearly important to
both men and women, the proofs of age suggest that baptism was a ceremony
dominated by women, although men played a role as godfathers, priest or
witnesses. Because baptism, according to the proofs, usually took place within
a day of the birth and post-partum women usually stayed in their home until
the time of purification, mothers did not attend the baptisms of their chil-
dren. Instead, a procession of women carried the baby to and from church,
sometimes with the help of the godfather.64 Men sometimes attended the
ceremony or feasted with the father afterwards.65 Many jurors witnessed the
procession as it passed, or met the party in the church when they were there
on other business.66 Gift-giving also had a place at baptisms. One godfather
gave the child a half mark and a ring.67 Such gifts made baptism even more
memorable for witnesses and the donor.
Less-formal community events include the rituals of visits and gift-giving
to the woman during her period of confinement. By far the best study of
gift-giving and visits during the woman’s lying-in before 1500 is Jacqueline
Musacchio’s study of the art and ritual of childbirth in Renaissance Italy,
where sweetmeats, silver spoons and other gifts were given.68 The evidence of
the proofs suggests that in England both men and women visited the mother
in confinement and gave gifts to new mothers and their babies.69 Gifts to
women sometimes took the form of special foods. One mother received
lampreys and hens from men in the community.70 A baby received a gold
buckle, another a gold ring and another an ox and a cow.71 Such visits allowed
the community to view the baby and interact with the new mother and also
created collective memories that jurors recalled decades later.
Purification, carried out three to six weeks after the birth, was the religious
ceremony marking a woman’s ritual cleansing of the impurity associated with
childbirth and formal reintegration into society following her confinement
after the birth. It was often the occasion for an elaborate community celebra-
62 See for example IPM vol. 6, no. 240.

63 IPM vol. 5, nos 68, 152, 285; vol. 6, no. 335.
64 IPM vol. 6, nos 62, 190.
65 IPM vol. 3, nos 430, 483; vol. 5, nos 52, 151.
66 IPM vol. 6, no. 68.
67 IPM vol. 5, no. 67.
68 Musacchio, Art and Ritual of Childbirth, pp. 41–6, 86, 126.
69 IPM vol. 3, no. 214; vol. 4, no. 54; vol. 6, no. 62.
70 IPM vol. 6, no. 434.
71 IPM vol. 6, nos. 190, 202, 754.
57
tion, sometimes marked by an ostentatious feast held by the father.72 Like
baptism, such community celebrations of purification loomed large in the
memories of witness. Witnesses frequently reported having attended puri-
fication ceremonies and feasts, often along with their wives.73 One witness
complained bitterly that he had not been invited to the feast.74 Another
witness recalled the age of the heir because the heir at age three, along with
her parents, had attended the purification feast of his wife.75 Lee suggests that
men deliberately tried to make feasts memorable, so that attendees would
be able to testify to the age of the heir if necessary76 and in fact a couple of
fathers asked their guests at feasts to be prepared to testify, one additionally
having the date of birth written on the hall wall.77 One purification feast
was still remembered as particularly noteworthy twenty-one years later, as
the father had invited most of the ‘good’ men in the community, including
abbots and priors.78 Certainly the frequency with which purification feasts
were mentioned as reasons for remembering births suggests that this was
a successful strategy. While purification was, of course, a religious ritual
performed at a church, in the depositions of jurors, the secular celebration
tends to eclipse the church ritual.
At first glance, English proofs of age, in their exclusive use of male witnesses
whose words were recorded by male bureaucrats, appear to represent a direct
rejection of the value of women’s memories. In this method of establishing
age, men’s memories of events fourteen to twenty-one years in the past were
privileged, even though women, as birth attendants, were likely to have much
more direct knowledge of the ages of heirs. Upon closer examination, though,
the proofs of age reveal a more complex picture. While women in England
were not directly involved in the writing of such records, they played a vital
role in creating the community memories that underlay such records, and
the memories recorded in the proofs stand as testament to the impact that
women’s words and actions had on the men around them. Women shared
stories of birth with men, and these stories were fundamental to the deposi-
tions of male jurors who did not hesitate to mention women as their source
of information. These records are likewise important in demonstrating that
72 For purification, see Paula M. Rieder, On the Purification of Women: Churching in

Northern France, 1100–1500 (New York and Houndmills, 2006); Lee, ‘A Women’s
Rite’ and ‘The Purification of Women after Childbirth: A Window onto Medieval
Perceptions of Women’, Florilegium 14 (1995–96), 43–55; Joanne M. Pierce, ‘“Green
Women” and Blood Pollution: Some Medieval Rituals for the Churching of Women
after Childbirth,’ Studia Liturgica 29 (1999), 191–215.
73 See for example IPM vol. 3, nos 214, 427, 430, 627; vol. 4, nos 431, 432, 483, 484.
74 IPM vol. 4, no. 328.
75 IPM vol. 3, no. 621.
76 See Lee, ‘A Women’s Rite’, as before.
77 IPM vol. 5, nos. 113, 158.
78 IPM vol. 6, no. 336.
58
Remembering Birth
birth, although usually attended only by women, was not something solely
of interest to women. Birth was part of the rich fabric of community life in
thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century England, and this helped to shape
the memories of male jurors. Both men and women engaged in collective
celebrations associated with births in the community, such as baptism, puri-
fications and visits to the mother during confinement, building memories
that encompassed both the activities and words of men and women. Men’s
memories recorded in proofs of age make it clear that men were anxious for
news of community births and gossiped freely with both women and other
men about births, nursing arrangements and celebratory events, creating a
common memory that arose out of conversation and lived experience. Thus
the memories preserved in the proofs of age were created by both men and
women collectively, although they were spoken and recorded by men.
59
4
‘Ides gnornode/geomrode giddum’:

Remembering the Role of a friðusibb
in the Retelling of the Fight
at Finnsburg in Beowulf
Elizabeth Cox
T he Old English poem Beowulf is about memory. The poem is found in

the late-tenth-century MS BL Cotton Vitellius A.XV manuscript and is
set in the sixth-century Scandinavian homelands from where the people who
became the Anglo-Saxons had migrated in the fifth century. It is a cultural
myth, a remembered story which endures because it continues to exert a hold
over people’s imagination in its continuing capacity to absorb and interpret
experience. As Nicholas Howe writes, ‘[a]s it survives organically within a
culture and inspires its imaginative works, this myth testifies to the belief that
the past can shape the present and, by extension, the future.’1
The tradition of transmitting stories of the past through oral poetry was
important for an early society with no written records. Indeed, it provided
continuity, a way for people to understand themselves against those who had
gone before them. It gave them models for the organization of their society
and a benchmark by which to live: a benchmark which Matthew Innes terms
‘an image of an ideal order, a Golden Age against which the present could be
judged’.2 Howe also interprets this as ‘an account of that ancestral past which,
despite any evidence to the contrary, gives a group its irreducible common
identity’.3 The very act of passing on this story/history was in itself an act of
memory by the scops [poets], who undertook the responsibility of remem-
bering and transmitting their society’s identity through time, complete with
successes and failures. Whilst transmitting this memory, they also had the
1 Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (Notre Dame, IN,
1989), p. 4.
2 Matthew Innes, ‘Introduction: Using the Past, Interpreting the Present, Influencing the
Future’, in The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Matthew
Innes (Cambridge, 2000), p. 1.
3 Howe, Migration and Mythmaking, p. 5.
61
Elizabeth Cox
opportunity, consciously or subconsciously, to add their own agenda and
interpretation with the changing times. As memory is by its very nature
organic and subjective, each time a memory is transmitted, there is a possi-
bility that it may be given a subjective slant capable of being used to change
the way society reacts to events from its past and its present. In the context
of Beowulf, that memory, therefore, would acquire some stability only when
written down; even then, with each copy made there may have been subtle
changes. As this is the only extant version of the poem, however, we have
no way of comparing it to others.
Because of its centrality to the continuity of society, memory was prized
by the people of the Middle Ages in a way it is not prized today, due to a
great change in the relative status of imagination and memory in the modern
world. According to Mary Carruthers, ‘many moderns have concluded that
medieval people did not value originality or creativity’.4 Indeed, as she goes
on to assert:
It was memory that made knowledge into useful experience, and memory that
combined these pieces of information-become-experience into what we call
‘ideas,’ what they were more likely to call ‘judgements’.5
In a world where there were no books, or very few, memory performed a

crucial role in the transmission of history and culture. Its transmitters were
highly skilled in the act of ‘remembering’, a point also made by Carruthers,
who asserts: ‘insufficient attention has been paid to the pedagogy of memory,
to what memory was thought to be, and how and why it was trained’.6 This
essay, therefore, addresses the idea of the transmission of memory over
time and its transformation into learning, experience and judgement. It also
discusses how this can be applied to the exchange of women and, in partic-
ular, the experience of the friðusibb [peaceweaver] in Beowulf. Such exchange
of women through marriage, undertaken purely for the purpose of family,
land generation and resolution of conflict, formed merely a commercial
transaction and one in which perhaps, as Luce Irigaray asserts, ‘total consum-
mation of the marriage never takes place’: because there is no equality in
the relationship, there is consequently no equality of communication on the
psychological level either.7 However, if we examine Beowulf and consider the
role of Wealhtheow, Hrothgar’s queen and friðusibb, it is possible to identify
a challenge to this theory, something which I will discuss later. Neverthe-
less, from Irigaray’s perspective, the woman is forever a commodity in the

(Cambridge, 1990), p. 1.
5 Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 1.
6 Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 8.
7 Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York, 1993), p. 58.
62
patriarchal world. Be it uncle, husband or father, even her king or God, a
woman is always subject to the man who ‘owns’ her. Her marriage will always
be conditional upon the decision of the ‘man’ to allow it to flourish in any
other way apart from its symbolic and social function as the cement which
binds the patriarchal world. Her destiny is to be enclosed within marriage
and the home. As Irigaray adds in this same context:
These marriages – mandatory for saving the one or the other, the one and
the other, in corporeal or genealogic destiny, living form or name – always
remain conditional. No doubt, they perform a symbolic and social function.
They procreate children, construct castles, cultivate the earth, build cities. All
the same, love in these tales is always star-crossed. Neither flesh, nor spirit,
nor body, nor name are allied, generated, regenerated, allowed to flourish.8
In this essay, therefore, I will draw on Irigaray’s theory in the context of

Beowulf and foreground the change from pure commodity to woman of
power operating within the patriarchal status quo, through discussion of
the peaceweaver roles of Hildeburh, Wealhtheow, Thryth and, briefly, Frea-
waru, all queens remembered by the poet. In order to demonstrate the tran-
sition from passive to diplomatic peaceweaver, I will show how, through
addressing issues of time and memory, the poet highlights this evolution
of the role of the friðusibb in the poem. Indeed, remembrance of the fate
of the peaceweaver Hildeburh, in the retelling of the Fight at Finnsburg,
becomes a catalyst for the discourse and, as we shall see, the poet subtly uses
these memories to demonstrate the futility and inhumanity of the practice
of exchanging women for purposes of peaceweaving. The remembering of
these women by the poet, along with their roles as commodities, moreover,
presents these memories as intrinsically gendered: not only are the women
exchanged and used as commodities but they are also placed in the untenable
position of coping with the subsequent division of loyalties which peace-
weaving generates. As Irigaray explains, ‘as commodities, women are thus
two things at once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value’.9
In her essay ‘The Traffic in Women’, Gayle Rubin suggests that each society
has its own system, its own order for the organization and control of the
biology of sex and procreation. Traditionally, when a young girl was married,
she left her family home and entered that of her husband, and became what
Rubin terms ‘a gift’ from her family to her husband’s. Rubin cites Levi-Strauss’s
idea that ‘marriages are the most basic form of gift exchange’. Gift-giving
confers upon its participants a special relationship of trust, solidarity and
mutual aid, and consequently women are the most precious of gifts. Thus,
it follows that in order to be termed a ‘gift’ a woman has to be physically
8 Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, pp. 58–9.

9 Luce Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie
Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2004), p. 802.
63
Elizabeth Cox
‘given’, that is, moved from her family home to her husband’s. From then
onwards, she has no rights to the property of her father and is vulnerable to
the whims of her husband and his family. The gift of a woman, therefore, is
more profound, because, as Rubin asserts, ‘the relationship thus established
is not just one of reciprocity, but one of kinship. The exchange partners have
become affines, and their descendants will be related by blood.’10 This is espe-
cially crucial to the peaceweaver narratives of Hildeburh and Wealhtheow,
as we shall see.
Rather than viewing the woman as what Rubin terms a ‘gift’ between
families, in the context of his discussion of the marriage relationship between
kings and queens, Tom Shippey describes the strategies governing such
marital arrangements in terms of expediency and use.11 He identifies that the
union might be more tightly sealed if the bride’s son were sent back to her
own people to be raised by his maternal uncles and to live among maternal
cousins. As Shippey points out:
A man’s maternal cousins, accordingly, were neither his competitors for inher-
itance nor potential liabilities for involving him in trouble, while a maternal
uncle, unlike a paternal one, could protect a nephew without having to keep a
jealous eye on the prospects of his own sons. Such observations may make one
think again about the real role of the queen or ‘peaceweaver’. Perhaps the vital
relationship was not between husband and wife, nor parents and children, but
between the children of the next generation: the male maternal cousins, who
could be expected to be on friendly and non-competitive terms.12
Here, Shippey clearly recognizes the women in these arrangements as pure

commodities for the furtherance of the strategy of the tribe or family. In his
estimation, they are merely tools to strengthen family alliances and ensure
the relationships of the next generation.
On the other hand, in her article ‘The Traffic of Women in Germanic
Literature’, Carol Parrish Jamison examines the situation of the women sold
or gifted as diplomatic tools, although she does not address the value of the
memory of these women’s situations for the future of the Germanic society.
She writes:
The woman could become, in the best of situations, a sort of diplomat, partici-
pating actively in marital arrangements, advising her husband, and engaging,
to some extent, in the negotiations of the mead hall. However in a society that
10 Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in
Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London,
1975), pp. 157–210 (p. 173).
11 Tom Shippey, ‘Wicked Queens and Cousin Strategies in Beowulf and Elsewhere’, The
Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval North-Western Europe 5 (2001), http://www.
heroicage.org/issues/5/shippey1.html (accessed 15 April 2008).
12 Shippey, ‘Wicked Queens’.
64
valued warfare, marrying off women as a means to ensure peace could turn
out badly, in such cases emphasizing the woman’s unfortunate plight as object
of male desire.13
In the light of Jamison’s argument, I would first like to examine such a plight
in the case of Hildeburh and the Fight at Finnsburg, and then compare her
situation with those of the other peaceweaver queens in Beowulf, taking also
into account the agency of both time and memory in the construction of
this role.
The term friðusibb (or freoðuwebbe) is often applied to women given in
marriage in order to secure peace among enemies or rival peoples. However,
according to Dorothy Carr Porter, the term appears only three times within
the Old English Corpus, which has caused critics such as Larry M. Sklute to
conclude that the term ‘does not necessarily reflect a Germanic custom of
giving a woman in marriage to a hostile tribe in order to secure peace’. Instead,
Sklute sees it as a poetic metaphor which refers to the person whose function
it seems to be to perform openly the action of making peace by weaving to
the best of her art a tapestry of friendship and amnesty.14 By contrasting the
memory of Hildeburh’s role as ‘traditional’ peaceweaver with that of Weal-
htheow, I will argue that the poet is highlighting Wealhtheow as ‘diplomatic’
peaceweaver, a role more in tune with Sklute’s definition of friendship and
amnesty.15 Rather than accept what fate may decree, Wealhtheow attempts
to influence the events at Heorot, as we shall see. The present of the poem
in which Wealhtheow speaks is essentially also a memory, of course. From
this I conclude that the poet has juxtaposed the two memories: that of ‘tradi-
tional voiceless peaceweaver’ and the changing role of the politically skilled
peaceweaver demonstrated by Wealhtheow, who, by her actions, unleashes
the potential for a new type of society to develop with different values.
By the tenth century the new Anglo-Saxon society was a Christian one,
which had developed in a new land and therefore had different needs. In
Beowulf the poet has used the cognitive symbols of the past as a vehicle for
a new ideology; using a traditional form of memory transmission, he weaves
within it ideas relevant to a changing society. By referring to the memory of
that past ‘Golden Age’, the new society had an opportunity for reassessment;
a chance to review past practices and develop new ones which fitted more
closely with the emergent culture.
13 Carol Parrish Jamison, ‘Traffic of Women in Germanic Literature: The Role of the
Peace Pledge in Marital Exchanges’, Women in German Yearbook, vol. 20, ed. Ruth-
Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Marjorie Gelus (Lincoln, NE and London, 2004), pp. 13–36
(p. 14).
14 Larry M. Sklute, ‘Freothuwebbe in Old English Poetry’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen
71.4 (1970), 534–40 (538).
15 Dorothy Carr Porter, ‘The Social Centrality of Women in Beowulf’, The Heroic Age 5
(2001), http://www.heroicageorg.issues/5/porter1.html (accessed 27 December 2010).
65
Elizabeth Cox
Contained within the text of Beowulf is the story of the battle at Finns-
burg, which appears as a digression, beginning at line 1068 and finishing at
line 1159. This story of an event in the tribe’s past is told by Hrothgar’s scop
[poet] to the assembled company in Heorot at the feast celebrating Beowulf ’s
defeat of Grendel. Another telling of this story was preserved as the Finns-
burg Fragment in a different manuscript, Lambeth Library MS 487, thought
to have belonged to the library at Lambeth Palace, but now lost. Transcribed
in the late seventeenth century by the British scholar George Hickes and
published as part of an anthology of Anglo-Saxon and other antiquities in
1705, the Fragment describes the first of the two fights alluded to in the
Beowulf episode. As the first of the two battles is plainly described, this leads
critics to conclude that the Fragment must precede the episode.16
In contrast to the Fragment, which is a more traditional battle poem, the
scop’s retelling of the story in Beowulf, although still celebrating the death of
Hnæf of the Scyldings in the slaughter at Finnsburg, unusually also mentions
by name Hildeburh, Hnæf ’s sister and Finn of the Frisians’ wife. In so doing,
the poet not only departs from the traditional format of the battle poem by
remembering Hildeburh by name, but also reveals the treachery and futility
of inter-tribal war and revenge. There is a suggestion that Hildeburh had been
given in marriage as a friðusibb to the Frisian chief in the hope of settling an
old feud and securing permanent peace – but with a grievous result. From
the poem, we can deduce that some fifteen or twenty years must have elapsed
since the marriage, as Hildeburh’s son is old enough to fight in the battle
and be killed.17 In this digression, Hildeburh is seen as a wife, mother and
sister who has to cope with the knowledge that her husband’s men killed her
brother and her brother’s or husband’s men killed her son. The digression
does not make it clear on which side her son was fighting, but, as mentioned
earlier, if tradition had been followed, he would have been brought up by
his maternal relatives and would therefore have been fighting alongside his
uncle and against his father.18 On whichever side he was fighting, however,
his mother, Hildeburh, is placed in an impossible position within this web
of deceit, betrayal and family loyalty:
Finnes eaferum, ða hie se fær begeat
hæleð Healf-Dena, Hnæf Scyldinga,
in Freswæle feallan scolde.
ne huru Hildeburh herian þorfte
Eotena treowe; unsynnum wearð
beloren leofum æt þam lindplegan
16 Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John
D. Niles (Toronto, Buffalo, London, 4th edn, 2008), p. 273. All future references will
be taken from this edition.
17 Klaeber’s Beowulf, ed. Fulk et al., p. 272.
18 Shippey, ‘Wicked Queens’.
66
bearnum ond broðrum; hie on gebyrd bruron
gare wunde; þæt wæs geomuru ides! (lines 1068–75)
(Together with Finn’s offspring, Hnæf of the Scyldings, hero of the Half-
Danes, had to fall in a Frisian slaughter, when the disaster befell them.
Indeed, Hildeburh had no cause to praise the loyalty of the Jutes; guiltless,
she was deprived of her loved ones, a son and a brother, in that shield-play;
wounded by the javelin, they fell to their fate; she was a sad woman!)19
With the word ‘unsynnum’ (guiltless), the scop makes full use of Hildeburh’s
experience to expose the situation of women who have been traded as a
friðusibb, but who are now caught in the crossfire of revenge hostilities and
divided loyalties.
Hildeburh in Beowulf is silent. She does not speak directly to us but only
through the memory and the male-constructed discourse of the poet. The
poet forms her identity within this structure of memory and, perhaps even
subliminally, awakens the awareness of the audience to her plight. He (and
here we must assume that the poet is male) makes her actions speak for her
and, consequently, a gendered memory of her is formed which highlights
her helplessness in the face of male treachery and revenge killings. This is
dramatically demonstrated by the poet’s poignant words:
Het ða Hildeburh æt Hnæfes ade
hire selfre sunu sweoloðe befæstan,
banfatu bærnan ond on bæl don
eame on eaxle. Ides gnornode,
geomrode giddum. (lines 1114–18)
(Then Hildeburh commanded her own son to be committed to the flames
on Hnæf ’s pyre, the body to be burned, and to be placed on the fire shoulder
to shoulder with his uncle. The woman mourned, chanted a dirge.)
With these words he paints an arresting picture of Hildeburh, a woman

strong and defiant (both male characteristics) in her sadness, yet helpless,
a victim of the system made by and for men. She is a woman who defies
the dichotomy of active male/passive woman famously identified by Hélène
Cixous, who argues that wherever there is discourse there is always the same
metaphor, that of binary opposition (man/woman; speaking/writing; supe-
rior/inferior; active/passive, for example).20 This indicates a tentative move-
ment by both male (the poet) and female (Hildeburh) to challenge the status
quo. She can, in Cixous’ words, ‘threaten the stability of the masculine struc-
19 Translation taken from Michael Swanton, ed. Beowulf (Manchester, 1978). All future
translations will be taken from this edition. The page/line numbers are the same as
the ones in Klaeber’s Beowulf.
20 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellars (New York,
1994), pp. 35–46 (p. 35).
67
Elizabeth Cox
ture’ if she questions her position and does not acknowledge the codes and
value of patriarchy within which women are portrayed as being secondary
to men.21 Indeed, the poet has given her a strength and dignity to challenge
her position as a ‘passive’ peaceweaver. In a potential act of mimesis, Hilde-
burh foregrounds the self-destruction of the revenge system by taking on a
masculine role and placing the bodies of her son and her brother side by
side on the funeral pyre, where they become the sacrificial commodities; she
unites them in death, where she could not in life.
Hildeburh and many others like her would have spent their lives torn
between loyalty to their blood family and their husband’s family, with their
offspring belonging through blood to both families. When tribes were at
war with one another, it was the woman who was traded for the sake of
peace, and who, as Rubin has posited, suffered within this process, and, of
course, Hildeburh’s story fully confirms this. If, as has Hildeburh, she has
borne sons by the man who killed her brothers, then she has to live with
the knowledge that her son may have been slaughtered by his uncle or one
of his father’s men. Indeed, this situation was not unknown in the ancestral
Scandinavian homeland, and the memory of similar situations would have
been deeply entrenched in Anglo-Saxon oral history. For example, in the
Norse saga Volvndarkviða, we hear the story of Weland, who, in an act of
revenge, kills both of Beadohild’s brothers, rapes her and makes her preg-
nant.22 The peaceweaver can, therefore, in many ways be read as the voiceless
victim of an intolerable situation within a male-dominated society. Indeed,
in the male world of the poem within which a woman is traditionally valu-
able only for her exchange value between men, Hildeburh’s prescribed role
is to become a mnemonic tool to perpetuate deeply entrenched masculinist
ideologies of war and revenge.23 However, by allowing her an active identity
within this memory, the poet is simultaneously acknowledging her existence
and drawing attention to her role within these ideologies.
As the poet also makes clear, Hildeburh loses not only her brother and
son as a result of treachery but also her husband, Finn, who is killed in
his own home by Hengest, thus perpetuating the cycle of violence.24 This
exiled warrior, possibly a kinsman of Hildeburh and a guest in the home of
21 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, p. 350.

22 For a translation of the poem, see http://www.northvegr.org/lore/poetic/015.php. For
the Scandinavian text, see http://etext.old.no/Bugge/volundar.html (both accessed 11
January 2008).
23 Luce Irigaray, ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks
and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York, 1981), pp. 99–106 (p. 105).
24 In lines 1136–55, the poem recounts how, when the peace treaty was made following
the battle at Finnsburg, Hengest accepted the hospitality of Finn and remained behind
throughout the winter. When winter was over, he longed to be away from Finn’s
court and betrayed his place as a guest by killing his host in revenge for the battle at
Finnsburg.
68
her husband, not only betrays her by killing her husband but subsequently
carries her away, back to her own people, along with the rest of the battle
spoils. Once again Hildeburh becomes the victim of a masculine ideology of
exchange and revenge:
Sceotend Scyldinga to scypon feredon
eal ingesteald eorðcyninges,
swylce hie æt Finnes ham findan meahton
sigla, searogimma. Hie on sælade
drihtlice wif to Denum feredon,
læddon to leodum. (lines 1154–8)
(The Scylding marksmen carried away to their ships all the household prop-
erty of the king of that country, whatever jewels, skilfully-wrought gems,
they could find in the home of Finn. With a sea-voyage they carried the
noble woman away to the Danes, led her to her own people.)
As we can see from this, not only does Hildeburh lose her son, her brother,
her husband and her home, she is also transported as a recovered commodity
back to the people who ‘sold’ her into marriage in the first place, possibly to
repeat the revenge cycle and reprise her role as friðusibb. She has become a
failed peaceweaver and, as such, she is essentially equated with the treasure
which has been stolen from the home of her husband. As a result of her role
as a friðusibb, she is now homeless, nationless, a widow without the means
to support herself and a woman mourning the loss of her husband, son and
brother. Within this context, we are reminded by the poet of Hildeburh’s
precarious life and the extent of her loss: ‘þær heo ær mæste heold/ worolde
wynne’ (earlier she possessed the greatest of earthly pleasure) (lines 1078–9).
It is no wonder the poet describes her as ‘geomuru ides’ (a sad woman).
Hildeburh, of course, is as much a victim of hostilities as are the warriors
who perpetrate the feud. She is guiltless, helpless and voiceless in the events
which surround her, a scapegoat for the perpetual violence of her society. As
René Girard has argued, ‘if vengeance is an unending process it can hardly
be invoked to restrain the violent impulses of society. In fact, it is vengeance
itself that must be restrained.’25 It is clear, therefore, that it is this perpetual
‘vengeance’ and the peaceweaver’s role within that endless cycle of male
blood-letting that the poet is remembering here and asking the assembled
company also to remember through the story of Hildeburh.
In a study on the gendered nature of blood, Peggy McCracken has
argued: ‘[t]he gendering of blood defines not only explicit power relation-
ships between individuals – but also culturally endorsed values and sexual
25 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London and New York,
2005), p. 17.
69
Elizabeth Cox
identities.’26 Hildeburh’s situation endorses McCracken’s argument that blood
is explicit in gendered values, as she has to deal with the blood which has
been spilled in the furtherance of the male vengeance narrative and watch
whilst her slaughtered son and brother, her blood relatives, are purified in
the flames of the funeral pyre.27 Because this pursuit of bloody vengeance is
an ideal associated with warrior masculinity, the woman and her purification
rites of peaceweaving are needed to cleanse the men and thereby endorse
male cultural values of social order and justice. Consequently, in remem-
bering the purifying rites performed by Hildeburh, the poet links the blood
of the battlefield with gender relationships. But, via his memory of this ‘sad’
woman, the poet confirms the female suffering which is needed to endorse
these values.
As mentioned earlier, the keyword within the poet’s discourse is unsynnum
(guiltless), and upon this the whole ethos is based. That he should acknowl-
edge Hildeburh’s situation and her part in this affair leaves the audience with
a new consideration. He has gendered this memory by speaking on behalf
of Hildeburh, but this is not merely a case of ventriloquism. By giving voice
to her dignified lamentation, he is, in a subtle and subliminal way, showing
empathy for her situation and asking the audience to reconsider the position
of the friðusibb.
In a similar way, the poet asks us to consider the situation of Wealhtheow,
another friðusibb who appears in the poem. Unlike Hildeburh, who is silent
and passive, the poet allows Wealhtheow to be vocal and active and, as a
direct result of the minstrel’s remembering of the Fight at Finnsburg, Hroth-
gar’s wife, Wealhtheow, is prompted to speak about the concerns she has for
her own sons. Shari Horner agrees that this concern has been exacerbated by
Wealhtheow’s hearing about Hildeburh’s situation and the carnage at Finns-
burg.28 Wealhtheow clearly wishes to avoid the same fate for her own sons;
as she passes the mead-cup amongst the company, she turns first towards
Hrothgar and his nephew Hrothulf and, using her traditional ceremonial role
in an act of mimesis that appears to endorse male values, reminds Hrothulf of
his duty, stating too her concern about Hrothgar’s intention to take Beowulf
as an honorary son:
Me man sægde þæt þu ðe for sunu wolde
hererinc habban. Heorot is gefælsod,
beahsele beorhta. Bruc, þenden þu mote,
manigra medo, ond þinum magum læf
26 Peggy McCracken, The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender and
Medieval Literature (Philadelphia, PA, 2003), p. 1.
27 McCracken, Curse of Eve, p. 1.
28 Shari Horner, The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English Literature
(Albany, NY, 2001), p. 76.
70
folc ond rice, þonne ðu forð scyle,
metodsceaft seon. Ic mine can
glædne Hroþulf, þæt he þa geogoðe wile
arum healdan, gyf þu ær þonne he,
wine Scildinga, worold oflætest;
wene ic þæt he mid gode gyldan wille
uncran eaferan, gif he þæt eal gemon,
hwæt wit to willan ond to worðmyndum
umborwesendum ær arna gefremedon. (lines 1175–87)
(They told me that you wish to take the warrior to be a son to you. Heorot,
the fair ring-hall, is cleansed. Rejoice while you may, in many rewards, and
when you must go forth to face the decree of destiny, bequeath people and
kingdom to your kinsmen. I know my gracious Hrothulf – that he will
treat these youths honourably if you, friend of the Scyldings, should leave
the world before him; I imagine that he will repay our offspring well, if he
remembers all the favours we both bestowed on him for his pleasure and
his honour while he was still a child.)
In this speech, rather than being the helpless ‘victim’ as was Hildeburh, we
can see Wealhtheow clearly wishes to shape the future herself. Using diplo-
macy, she reminds Hrothulf of the favours he has received from his uncle and
asks him to be kind to her sons after the death of Hrothgar, if he inherits.
No doubt, she is also aware of a situation where she and her sons could be
dispossessed if Beowulf becomes heir to Hrothgar, and uses her negotiating
skills to safeguard her own position and that of her sons as rulers. As Horner
asserts:
She creates a new version of the traditional peace-weaving text, a new ending;
rather than passively accepting events as they unfold (as the men determine
them), she wishes to shape the future herself.29
Instead of weaving ‘peace’ between tribes, then, Wealhtheow is ‘unweaving’

the potential relationship between her husband and Beowulf, ensuring that
Hrothgar binds more closely with his own kin. Whilst Horner sees this
example of female assertiveness as representing the ‘incipient disintegration
of society’, I consider it as bearing witness to a desire for social development:
here we have evidenced an awareness developing through memory and its
emergence within discourse to enable society to change by acknowledging
the errors of the past.30 In this discourse, moreover, we can see a clear contra-
diction of the Irigarayan notion that objects of use, such as peaceweavers,
cannot have the right to speak.31 Clearly, Wealhtheow does claim the right to
29 Horner, Discourse of Enclosure, p. 77.

31 Irigaray asks how such objects of use and transaction can ever claim the right to speak,
and suggests that women have to remain an unrecognized ‘infrastructure’, and that the
71
Elizabeth Cox
speak – but encloses her words strategically within the social constructions
of her function as hostess. In so doing, her mimetic act confirms its own
disruptive potential. As Irigaray states elsewhere:
There is, an initial phase, perhaps only one ‘path’, the one historically assigned
to the feminine, that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliber-
ately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affir-
mation, and thus begin to thwart it. Whereas a direct feminine challenge to
this condition means demanding to speak as a (masculine) ‘subject’, that is, it
means to postulate a relations to the intelligible that would maintain sexual
difference. To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the
place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply
reduced to it.32
Read within this context, therefore, Wealhtheow is attempting to formulate

her own plan with regard to her sons at this point. Although working within
patriarchal rules, she is manoeuvring herself into a position of control, the
memory of Hildeburh having caused her to be more aware of the situation
which could develop with her own sons and to attempt to prevent a recur-
rence by using the former queen’s experience to make a judgement of her
own – that of speaking out. She is a woman determined to have a ‘voice’,
rather than become the ‘voiceless’ woman, Hildeburh.
The story of Finnsburg has also reminded Wealhtheow of how uncle and
nephew can be on opposite sides of a battle, and we see a foreshadowing of
this when Wealhtheow first enters the hall to take up her cup-bearing duties:
Þa cwom Wealhþeo forð
gan under gyldnum beage þær þa godan twegen
sæton suhtergefæderan; þa gyt wæs hiera sib ætgædere,
æghwylc oðrum trywe. (lines 1162–5)
(Then Wealhtheow came forth, wearing a golden circlet to where the two
good ones sat nephew and uncle together; furthermore they were still at
peace, faithful to each other.)
Memory and memorializing serve not only to remember a society’s history

and maintain the status quo, but also, as Carruthers reminds us, it is memory
which transforms knowledge into useful experience.33
This reading is corroborated earlier in the poem, when Wealhtheow is
presented as thanking Beowulf for his rescue of Heorot from Grendel’s attack.
circulation of their sexualized bodies underwrites the organization and reproduction

of a social order in which they cannot and have never taken part. See Luce Irigaray,
‘The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine’, in The Irigaray
Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford, 1991), p. 131.
32 Irigaray, ‘The Power of Discourse’, p. 131.
72
Her speech contains a thinly veiled criticism of her husband and his inability
to fulfil his role as king and protector of his people. Evidence of her dissat-
isfaction is established in lines 625–8, when she thanks God that she may
count on ‘some warrior’ to help against wickedness:
Grette Geata leod, Gode þancode
Wisfæst wordum, þæs ðe hire se willa gelamp,
þæt heo on ænige eorl gelyfde
fyrena frofre. (lines 625–8)
(She greeted the prince of the Geats and, perfect in speech, thanked God
that her wish was fulfilled, that she might count on some warrior for help
against wickedness.)
Concealed within her gracious words is her condemnation of her husband

and his thegns for their lack of courage and strength. Wealhtheow’s actions
go against all the symbolic virtues of a peaceweaver and show a dichotomy
between the dutiful, perfectly mannered woman, who appears in the text
as submissive, beautiful, noble and decked with gold, and the woman who
denigrates her husband’s abilities as leader in public. Stacey Klein sees this
as a result of Hrothgar’s being now an old man and not having the strength
to protect his people. She argues that Hrothgar absents himself, both liter-
ally and figuratively, from the masculine world of heroic action, exhibiting
a notable preference for female company, as well as a tendency to disappear
quietly when battle is at hand.34
Additionally, for Klein, Hrothgar takes on the traditional role of the
‘mourning woman’, lamenting battle losses and encouraging others to extract
revenge for them. If this is the case, Wealhtheow may have taken upon herself
duties of state and is searching for someone to save the people. With the
words se willa she is representing herself as desiring, having her own wishes
that are not connected to her husband’s wishes, and she is ensuring that
Beowulf knows that. Despite her portrayal as a perfect woman dutiful and
obedient to her lord, Wealhtheow is aware of the implications of politics, and
she is a woman using the patriarchal structure so she can continue to ‘speak’
within the masculinist society in which she must live. She appeals to Beowulf
to look after her sons, should he be in the position of being Hrothgar’s heir.
She asks him to ‘þissum cnyhtum wes/ lara liðe; ic þe þæs lean geman’ (show
kindness to these boys with counsel; I shall remember to reward you for
that), and ‘Beo þu suna minum/ dædum gedefe’ (Be kind in your deeds to
my son). Here, she is also reminding him that reward comes at a price – a
valid concern, as Shippey argues, when consideration is given to the frequent
34 Stacy Klein, Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Notre
Dame, IN, 2006), p. 90.
73
Elizabeth Cox
civil wars between members of the paternal line.35 In these two acts, remem-
bered by the poet, she is skilfully appealing to both Hrothgar and Beowulf, to
ensure the future of her sons. It is evident that this is not the act of a passive
peaceweaver, but an active and astute woman who has tailored the peace-
weaving role to suit her own needs. By asserting that women can surmount
the passive peaceweaver role in order to influence political and dynastic deci-
sions, Wealhtheow actively rewrites the story of Hildeburh, a point which
Horner also makes, arguing that Wealhtheow’s commentary ‘locates creative
“textual” production at the site of female enclosure’ and offers a new ending
to the unsatisfactory peace-weaving narrative.36 Wealhtheow represents in
this a new diplomatic peaceweaver, as identified by Sklute, who takes part
in the running of her husband’s affairs.
This balance of power is also emphasized by Wealhtheow’s presumption
in addressing the male kinsfolk and asking them, in words which contain a
barely disguised threat, to make sure they remember their allegiances after
her husband’s death. Hrothulf, Hrothgar’s nephew and a potential heir to his
kingdom, would be a known quantity and should be able to be relied on to
remember repayment for honour and benefits he has received from Hrothgar
– but, from the memory of past feuds, this may not be true. Beowulf is an
unknown quantity, and Wealhtheow is unsure if he would honour her sons’
inheritance. She shows real concern for the fragility of the balance of life and
position, and realizes how transitory it all can be, a theme frequently found
in Anglo-Saxon literature, of course.37 If, as Wealhtheow’s name suggests, she
is a stranger and a former slave, she would be only too aware that her lack
of lineage might easily lead to her sons being disinherited and also be detri-
mental to herself.38 This is again brought home to her, when hearing about
Hildeburh’s situation after her husband, brother and son are killed. In rising
from slave to queen, presumably she would have had to work hard for her
position, possibly by scheming, plotting and judicious political manoeuvring.
As she has learned from the memory of Hildeburh’s experience, as a widow
and a friðusibb she could similarly lose her status and be left in a vulnerable
35 Shippey, ‘Wicked Queens’, p. 5.

37 The speaker in the Wanderer laments the transitory nature of life and the poem The
Ruin describes the ruin of a city that was once great.
38 The first part of Wealhtheow’s name ‘wealh’, according to the Bosworth Toller Anglo-
Saxon Dictionary, has the meaning of (a) ‘A foreigner, properly a Celt’, (b) ‘A slave,
servant – the derivation of slave from the name of a people’, or ‘A shameless person’;
the second part of her name ‘theow’ or ‘þeow’ means in the masculine form (a) ‘A
servant often with a stronger sense of slave’ and in the feminine form (b) ‘A female
servant or slave’. The etymology of her name suggests that she was named in the poem
for her former function/status in society before becoming Hrothgar’s queen. www.
bosworthtoller.com (accessed on 6 January 2015).
74
position, particularly if her sons were killed. Thus she is ensuring her posi-
tion in every eventuality.
The ability of gendered memory to transform the present in the poem
is further corroborated by the introduction of another queen remembered
by the poet. Beginning at line 1931, in another digression, the poet remem-
bers the story of Thryth, the queen who had men slaughtered for looking at
her. Ostensibly, she appears as an example of how a queen and peaceweaver
should not behave. However, although we are reminded that ‘Ne bið swylc
cwenlic þeaw/ idese to efnanne,/ þeah ðe hio ænlicu sy, þætte freoðuwebbe/
feores onsæce/ æfter ligetorne/ leofne mannan’ (It was no queenly custom
for a lady to practise, though lovely her person, that a weaver-of-peace, on
pretence of anger should deprive a belovèd kinsman of life) (lines 1940–3);
upon examination of the digression, we become aware of a subtle empathy
for Thryth’s situation appearing in the poet’s narrative.
It is clear that Thryth refuses to participate in what Irigaray calls the ‘prev-
alence of gaze’; she refuses to become a commodity, touched and gazed upon
by men and socially exchanged by them.39 Indeed, as Gillian Overing has
argued, Thryth ‘rebels’ against and ‘refuses’ the ownership of the male gaze,
something also posited by Jessica Jordan, for whom this refusal represents
a concerted ‘challenge’ of the gaze.40 By challenging the ‘gaze’ Thryth is also
challenging the male ideology of ownership and simultaneously reversing
traditional gender roles by turning the men’s gaze back upon themselves.
Jordan argues for the Thryth digression as a revenge narrative which fits
with the warrior ethos of the poem, but does not fit in terms of the other
women in the poem. She regards the eruption of Thryth’s narrative as ‘a kind
of slicing or penetration into the narrative that exposes patriarchal attitudes
as well as meeting the patriarchy on its own terms’.41 Certainly, the phallic
representation of swords in this episode and the slaying of men could be
said to demonstrate a deconstruction of patriarchy and a female penetration
of male constructs. When Jordan asks in this context, ‘What happens when
a woman watches the men being slain?’, we can answer that Thryth takes on
the enclosing cloak of patriarchy and turns it back on itself. In her attempt
to ‘kill’ patriarchal control, she resists being used as a commodity and as
peaceweaver – roles that have necessarily been assigned to her – in favour
of the masculine role of ‘avenger’.
In line 1945, however, the enigma which is Thryth is again the subject of
39 Irigaray, ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’, pp. 99–106 (p. 101).
40 Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale and Edwardsville,
IL, 1990), p. 104; Jessica Hope Jordan, ‘Women Refusing the Gaze: Theorizing Thryth’s
“Unqueenly Custom” in Beowulf and the Bride’s Revenge in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill
Bill Volume I’, The Heroic Age 5 (2001), http://heroicage.org/issues/9/forum2/html
(accessed 9 July 2013).
41 Jordan, ‘Women Refusing the Gaze’, p. 6.
75
Elizabeth Cox
masculine discourse, but this time by ale-drinking men in the hall who pass
comment on Thryth’s ultimate taming when she is married off to Offa as his
queen: ‘Ealodrincende oðer sæden’ (Those drinking ale told another tale).
Here, the ‘ale-drinkers’ tell how, upon her marriage, ‘Đær hio syððan well/
in gumstole, gode mære,/ lifgesceafta lifigende breac/ hiold heahlufan wið
hæleþa brego’ (There she subsequently occupied the throne well, famous for
virtue, while living made good use of the life destined for her, maintained
a profound love for the chief of heroes) (lines 1951–4). Within this remem-
bering of a powerful masculine memory is uncovered a desire for the rebel-
lious woman to be returned safely to the patriarchal enclosure. In the eyes
of the ‘ale-drinkers’, Thryth becomes a ‘new’ woman; all murderous thoughts
have left her mind and she has settled down within ‘the life destined for her’.
In other words, as a rebellious peaceweaver, she has failed in her role. Once,
however, she has been re-commodified as peaceweaver, through marriage to
Offa, in effect becoming once more the object of exchange between men, she
is miraculously cured of her ‘bad temper’. Thryth has now been ‘re-written’
in terms of her relationship to and control by men, has been brought back
within the boundaries, and consequently takes up a suitably unthreatening
position within the text.
We can therefore see how Thryth is doubly recalled in the text: first, she
is ‘remembered’ for her bad reputation; and then she is ‘re-remembered’ as
Offa’s good queen and peaceweaver. By juxtaposing these two memories, the
poet draws our attention to this dichotomy, asking his audience to consider
the two side by side. The ale-drinkers’ memory not only reinforces the status
quo of society (one of the functions of memory) but also revisits the failed
friðusibb of Hildeburh.
Jamison, commenting on Thryth’s rebellion against the peace exchange,
concedes that:
Her misbehaviour could be read as a rebellion against the peace exchange: she
is either an unmarried woman refusing to participate in a marital exchange
by killing would-be suitors or a married queen rebelling against the peace
exchange post facto by refusing to participate in her husband’s hall.42
I contend, however, that the memory of Thryth functions as a transition

between the passive, voiceless Hildeburh and the active, diplomatic Weal-
htheow; it is a memory that simultaneously looks both to future and to past.
Perhaps most pertinent to what I have been arguing here, after hearing the
scop recite the stories of Hildeburh and Thryth and observing the discourse
of Wealhtheow at the feast, in the passage beginning at line 2016 Beowulf
concedes that the role of friðusibb does not work. As he watches Hrothgar’s
daughter Freawaru carrying the ale cup to the warriors, Beowulf is prompted
42 Jamison, ‘Traffic of Women in Germanic Literature’, p. 25.
76
by what he has heard and cynically comments on the future that awaits
Freawaru:
Sio gehaten is
geong, goldhroden, gladum suna Frodan.
hafað þæs geworden wine Scyldinga,
rices hyrde, ond þæt ræd talað
þæt he mid ðy wife wælfæhða dæl,
sæcca gesette. Oft seldan hwær
æfter leodhryre lytle hwile
bongar bugeð, þeah seo bryd duge! (lines 2024–31)
(Young, adorned with gold, she is promised to the gracious son of Froda.
That has been agreed upon by the Scyldings’ friend, the guardian of the
kingdom, and he considers it good advice that, by means of this woman,
he should settle their share of slaughterous feuds, of conflicts. It seldom
happens after the fall of a prince that the deadly spear rests for even a little
while – worthy though the bride may be.)
Ultimately, through his acts of memory, the poet uses Beowulf, the hero, to
endorse and reinforce the futility of peace-weaving and the revenge killing it
fails to prevent, thus giving the idea credence to be absorbed by the audience.
I suggest, therefore, that, in the retelling of the Fight at Finnsburg, the
poet deliberately chooses to concentrate on the suffering of Hildeburh rather
than the heroism of the warriors. He demonstrates Hildeburh’s position as
a helpless, unsuccessful peaceweaver as being no fault of her own. In turn,
this highlights the impossibility of this role within the context of the cyclical
violence with which the poem concerns itself. Although she is unsynnum,
a commodity, a victim to perpetual hostility and revenge, she also upholds
the cultural values of the male society, purifying the male ethos through the
flames of the funeral pyre on which she lays her son and brother. As Horner
asserts, ‘the pyre serves as her commentary or gloss on the peace-weaving
system that is … destined to self-destruct’.43 Hildeburh is the traditional
‘voiceless’ woman of this society, yet she is given a voice through memory,
making a bridge between the voicelessness of the traditional friðusibb and
Wealhtheow, the peaceweaver who, in an act of mimesis, makes her voice
heard in political and diplomatic affairs.
In this act of memory, gendered through male discourse, the poet takes
the traditional images of the past and uses them to point the way to a
different future by asking his audience to remember the role of the friðusibb.
By recalling and naming Hildeburh and Freawaru, the traditional ‘voiceless’
peaceweavers, Thryth, the rebellious peaceweaver whose reputation is made
through the memories of the ale-drinkers, and Wealhtheow, an active diplo-
77
Elizabeth Cox
matic peaceweaver, he has allowed them to ‘speak’, directly and indirectly
from the realm of memory, about the role of the friðusibb in the tarnished
‘Golden Age’ of Anglo-Saxon society. This act of memory transmission is
both original and creative, and is used to teach, through experience, that
the old ideals are ripe for change: in effect, it posits ideas which are more in
tune with a Christian society. By remembering the women in this retelling
of tribal history, it proves that, through an act of gendered memory, the past
can shape the present and also the future.
78
5
Remembrance and Time in the Wooing Group
Ayoush Lazikani
I n the third book of his Liber confortatorius, the Flemish cleric Goscelin
of Saint-Bertin (c. 1035–1107) advises his beloved Eva, now an anchoress,
to remember Christ’s suffering, resurrection and ascension in all hours of
her existence.1 Goscelin encourages the anchoress to engage in a relentless
process of remembrance: a process designed to be painful and all-consuming,
stirring the heart towards love of Christ. In Aelred of Rievaulx’s (1110–1167)
De institutione inclusarum, the author discourages his biological sister, also
an anchoress, from becoming a schoolmistress. Aelred foregrounds the threat
that such a profession poses to her ‘memoria Dei’ (‘remembrance of God’):
Qualis inter haec memoria Dei, ubi saecularia et carnalia, etsi non perficiantur,
mouentur tamen, et quasi sub oculis depinguntur.2
(There before her very eyes, even though she may not yield to them, the recluse
has worldly and sensual temptations, and amid them all what becomes of her
continual remembrance of God?)3
As Aelred suggests, an anchoress’s existence is characterized by a never-ending

remembrance of Christ as man and Christ as God. This is discernible in the
Wooing Group, a group of thirteenth-century lyrical meditations on Christ
and the Virgin Mary associated in manuscript and linguistic history with the
anchoritic guidance text Ancrene Wisse. In the Wooing Group, it is made clear
1 Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, ‘The Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint Bertin’, ed. C. H.

Talbot, Studia Anselmiana xxxvii / Analecta Monastica 3rd series (Rome, 1955), 1–117
(83); all subsequent references are to this edition. The Liber confortatorius is never
cited in Ancrene Wisse or the Wooing Group, nor is there any evidence that the early
Middle English authors knew of the Liber. It remains an important analogue, however.
2 Aelred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum, in Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia, ed.
A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, CCCM i (Turnhout, 1971), p. 641; all subsequent references
are to this edition. The De institutione inclusarum is one of the Ancrene Wisse author’s
main sources.
3 This translation is that of Mary Paul Macpherson, ‘A Rule for the Life of a Recluse’, in
Treatises: the Pastoral Prayer (Kalamazoo, MI, 1982), pp. 41–102 (p. 50).
79
Ayoush Lazikani
that Christ is absent to the anchoress: his distance in Heaven is compounded
by his distance from her soul, burdened as it is with sins.4 But the anchoritic
existence is also defined by a need to make Christ almost present – both
spatially and temporally – through remembrance of him. Drawing on Jean-
Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan, among others, Patrick Fuery foregrounds
absence ‘not as a nothing, or nothingness, which might in turn reduce things
and subjects to nothingness, but as part of an active process’.5 In line with this
concept, the anchoress creates herself as a ‘desiring subject determined by
absences’, as she pursues Christ’s presence through meditation.6 In her 2010
monograph, which includes a chapter on the Wooing Group text Þe Wohunge
of ure Lauerd, Sarah McNamer observes that meditations from c. 1050 to 1530
demand imaginative presence.7 For the anchoress, such imaginative presence
is sought through the image-based vocabularies of her ‘devotional literacy’.8
As contributors to the anchoress’s rich devotional literacy, the Wooing Group
texts encourage her to create access to Christ – to the extent that he becomes
almost present. At times he is almost with the anchoress in the anchorhold;
at other times she is almost with him in Calvary. His near-presence is made
explicit at the close of Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd, where the author entreats
the anchoress to ‘þenc as tah he heng biside þe blodi up o rode’ (think as
though he hangs beside you, bloody, upon the Cross).9 The bloodied Christ
is not hanging beside her, but the anchoress must imagine it is ‘as tah’ he is.
She must invoke his presence through remembrance of him, and meditative
4 Despite the multifaceted audiences of both the Wooing Group and Ancrene Wisse in
the texts’ transmission history, this essay uses the singular ‘anchoress’ intentionally. Its
focus is on anchoritic readers of the texts, especially those anchoresses who had a high
level of literacy in English and French. See further Bella Millett, ‘Women in No Man’s
Land: English Recluses and the Development of Vernacular Literature in the Twelfth
and Thirteenth Centuries’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1150–1500, ed. Carol M.
Meale (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 86–103; and Elizabeth Robertson, ‘“This Living Hand”:
Thirteenth-Century Female Literacy, Materialist Immanence and the Reader of the
Ancrene Wisse’, Speculum 78 (2003), 1–36.
5 Patrick Fuery, The Theory of Absence: Subjectivity, Signification, and Desire (Westport,
CT and London, 1995), p. 5.
6 Fuery, Theory of Absence, p. 11. On the formation of subject through absence and lack
in Lacanian thought, see also Alan Vanier, Lacan (Paris, 1998), pp. 68–9.
7 Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion
(Philadelphia, PA, 2010), p. 1.
8 The term ‘devotional literacy’ is Margaret Aston’s: ‘Devotional Literacy’ in Lollards and
Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984), pp. 101–34.
9 Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd, etc, ed. W. Meredith Thompson, EETS o.s. 241 (1958), pp.
37–8, lines 645–58; all subsequent references to Wooing Group texts are to this edition.
Abbreviations (with the exception of the Tironian nota) are expanded, word-spacing is
modernized, and ‘wynn’ is rendered ‘w’. Translations of early Middle English are my
own. Henceforth Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd will be referred to as Wohunge.
80
texts are crucial tools in this process.10 As she reaches within herself to gain
remembrance of the Spousal Lamb, the anchoress brings herself closer to
her Lover’s arms, outstretched on the Cross and opened wide in the Here-
after. For, as the Wooing Group meditation On wel swuðe god ureisun of god
almihti clarifies, the latter caress of Heaven cannot be reached without first
embracing Christ on the Cross (p. 6, lines 57–62).11
Following the foundational work by Mary Carruthers, Elizabeth van Houts,
Janet Coleman and Patrick J. Geary, among others, memoria and temporality
have been the focus of major scholarship in more recent critical history.12
This has included the work by Greti Dinkova-Bruun on biblical versifica-
tion as ‘aide-mémoire’, by David Falvay on the cult development of three
thirteenth-century saints, by Milena Bartlovà on remembrance of the dead
in visual arts, and by Susan K. Hagen on memorability in Julian of Norwich’s
(1343–c. 1416) ‘visual theology’.13 Paul Strohm’s Theory and the Premodern
Text dedicates three chapters to time in a Chaucerian context, exploring texts’
inevitably unsuccessful attempts to ‘stabilize’ time, and the vulnerability of
the present to consumption by past and future.14 In her contribution to the
essay collection on the Wooing Group edited by Susannah Chewning, Jennifer
Brown touches upon the use of mnemonic techniques in Wohunge.15 Situ-
ating itself in the established and burgeoning scholarship on memory and
10 This terminology of meditative texts as ‘tools’ follows Rachel Fulton, ‘Praying with
Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice’, Speculum 81 (2006), 700–33. Fulton
argues that Anselm’s prayers are not simply ‘things made (or crafted)’, but rather
‘themselves tools for making’ (717).
11 Henceforth On wel swuðe god ureisun of god almihti will be referred to as Ureisun of
God.
(Cambridge, 2008; repr. 2009); see especially Chapters 6 and 7. Elisabeth van Houts,
Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe: 900–1200 (Basingstoke, 1999). Janet Coleman,
Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge,
1992), pp. 177 and 181; see Chapter 11. Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance:
Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1994).
13 Greti Dinkova-Bruun, ‘The Verse Bible as Aide-Mémoire’, in The Making of Memory
in the Middle Ages, ed. Lucie Doležalovà (Leiden, 2010), pp. 115–31; David Falvay,
‘Memory and Hagiography: The Formation of the Memory of Three Thirteenth-
Century Female Saints’, in Making of Memory, ed. Doležalovà, pp. 347–64; Milena
Bartlovà, ‘In Memoriam Defunctorum: Visual Arts as Devices of Memory’, in Making
of Memory, ed. Doležalovà, pp. 473–86; Susan K. Hagen, ‘The Visual Theology of Julian
of Norwich’, in Medieval Memory: Image and Text, ed. Frank Willaert, Herman Braet,
Thom Mertens and Theo Venckeleer (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 145–60. See also Anna
Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley, CA, 2005).
14 Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, MN, 2000). See Part II,
especially chapters 5 and 6.
15 Jennifer N. Brown, ‘Subject, Object and Mantra in Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd’, in The
Milieu and Context of the Wohunge Group, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Cardiff,
2009), pp. 66–83. See especially pp. 67, 73–5, 77, 79, 81.
81
Ayoush Lazikani
time, this present essay studies the anchoress’s attempts at invoking Christ’s
presence in the Wooing Group. It first assesses the instances of the term
munegunge (remembrance) in these texts, and subsequently examines the
anchoress’s shifting temporal perception in her meditation on the Passion as
she tries to make herself present in her Lover’s suffering.
Remembrance of Christ in the anchoritic existence is not a passive, super-
ficial recalling. It is a deeply active process that attempts to make him almost
present. As Mary Paul Macpherson observes on anchoritic memory in her
translation of Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum, following the work of
Charles Dumont and J. Lemaître:16
[…] memory does not mean simply a calling to mind but rather a re-presen-
tation and actual living presence of the reality somewhat as we have it in the
sacrifice of the Mass in response to Christ’s command: ‘Do this in remem-
brance of me’ (Luke 22:19).17
The body and blood consumed in an act of remembrance, as encapsulated in

Luke 22:19, is emphasized both by Goscelin in his Liber confortatorius (30)
and by Aelred in his twenty-sixth sermon for the Feast of All Saints:
Quia ergo expediebat nobis semper memores exsistere beneficiorum eius quae
nobis per praesentiam suam corporalem exhibuit, et quia sciuit memoriam
nostram esse corruptam per obliuionem, intellectum per errorem, studium per
cupiditatem, pie prouidit nobis ut ipsa sua beneficia non solum recitarentur
nobis per Scripturas, sed etiam nobis repraesentarentur per quasdam spiri-
tales actiones. Ideo, quando tradidit discipulis suis sacramentum corporis et
sanguinis sui, ait illis: Hoc facite in meam commemorationem.18
(Because it was expedient for us always to be mindful of his benefits which
he bestowed on us by his physical presence, and because he knew that our
memory was impaired by forgetfulness, our understanding by error, and our
attentiveness by covetousness, he made provision for us in his kindness. His
benefits are not only recounted for us in the Scriptures but are also made
present again to us by certain spiritual actions. That is why when he handed
down to his disciples the sacrament of his Body and Blood he told them: Do
this in remembrance of me.)19
16 See Charles Dumont, trans., La Vie de Recluse; La Prière Pastorale (Paris, 1961), pp.
19–22 and p. 52, n. 3.
17 Macpherson, ‘Rule for the Life of a Recluse’, p. 50, n. 20.
18 Aelredi Rievallensis, Sermones I–XLVI, Collectio Claraevallensis primo et secunda, ed.
Gaetano Raciti, CCCM iia (Turnhout, 1989), 210; all subsequent references are to this
edition. This essay does not suggest an anchoritic audience for Aelred’s sermons, but
see n. 2 above for the influence of the De institutione inclusarum on Ancrene Wisse.
19 Translations are from: Aelred of Rievaulx, The Liturgical Sermons: The First Clairvaux
Collection, Sermons One–Twenty-Eight, Advent–All Saints, trans. Theodore Berkeley
and M. Basil Pennington (Kalamazoo, MI, 2001), p. 354.
82
The Lord’s benefits are made present (‘repraesentarentur’) and are not simply
recounted.20 For the anchoress, Christ’s betrothed, such re-presentation of
Christ, especially of his loving torment during the Passion, is of pressing
importance. The anchorhold is a space that immerses her in the suffering
and delectable body of Christ. The visual presence of his flesh is implied
early in Part I of Ancrene Wisse, the part dedicated to the anchoress’s prayer,
when the author tells her to ‘þenche[ð] o Godes flesch ant on his deorewurðe
blod, þet is abuue þe hehe weoued’ (think on God’s flesh and on his precious
blood, which is above the high altar).21 Christ’s flesh is constantly in the
anchoress’s sight; the author refers to the moment the priest ‘heueð up Godes
licome’ (raises up God’s body) (12: 207), an allusion to the priest raising the
Host above his head.22 The signified shines through the sacramentum in this
incarnational image: it is Christ’s very ‘licome’ that is raised. In the anchor-
ess’s devotional literacy, the sight of the Host is reinforced by her imaginative
construction of Christ’s suffering flesh. She must imagine his blood-soaked
body on the Cross (11: 151–2) and she must ‘þenche o Godes rode, ase muchel
as ha eauer con mest oðer mei, ant of his derue pine’ (think on God’s Cross,
as much as she ever knows best how to or is able, and on his harsh pain)
(13–14: 248–9).
In Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, the sophisticated process of
remembrance of Christ is expressed through the term munegunge, a gerund
of Old English origin.23 Its status as a gerund draws attention to the activity
inherent in the process of remembrance: munegunge of Christ is an active
reformation, re-membering of Christ, with the anchoress re-forming her self
in her re-membering of him. There are two references to remembrance of
Christ in Part I of Ancrene Wisse, both instances relating to Christ’s wounds
(7–8: 34–55, and 11: 151–5). In Part II, the author describes the anchoress
blindfolding herself figuratively for love of Christ and for remembrance of
20 See the discussion of this by Dumont (trans.), La Vie de Recluse, p. 21.

21 Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College,
MS 402 with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols, EETS o.s. 325
and 326 (2005–2006), I, 7: 14–15; all subsequent references (to page and line numbers
respectively) are to this edition.
22 See Jill Stevenson, Performance, Cognitive Theory and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety
in Late Medieval York (New York, 2010), p. 72. Millett suggests that ‘the reference is
to the solemn elevation of the consecrated Host in the sight of the congregation (as
opposed to the small elevation before the consecration), a practice first sanctioned by
a synod of Paris in 1215’. See Millett (ed.), Ancrene Wisse, II:1/ 207.
23 See entry ‘minging (ger.)’ in the Middle English Dictionary (Online): http://quod.
lib.umich.edu/m/med/lookup.html (Ann Arbor, 2001). For a list of occurrences of
‘munegunge’ in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, see Concordance to Ancrene
Wisse: MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402, ed. Jennifer Potts, Lorna Stevenson
and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Cambridge, 1993), p. 526, and Concordances to the
Katherine Group and the Wooing Group (MS Bodley 34, MS Nero A XIV and Titus D
XVIII), ed. Lorna Stevenson and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Cambridge, 2000), p. 882.
83
Ayoush Lazikani
that love (‘for his luue ant i munegunge þrof ’, 42: 857–8); and in Part III she
kisses the crucifix in remembrance of his wounds (54: 250–2). Commemora-
tion is also important in Part VII, which has a powerful reference to mune-
gunge of Christ where the crucifix is likened to the commemorative shield
of a dead knight (148: 121–4). The anchoress’s remembrance is not one-sided,
however, for she is inspired by the Spousal Lamb’s own remembrance of her:
the author stresses that Christ ‘dude mearke of þurlunge in ure munegunge i
ba twa his honden’ (made marks of piercing in remembrance of us in both of
his two hands) (Part VII, 149: 172–4). As Christ pierced his hands in order to
remember the Creation he loves, so does the anchoress attempt to make her
Lover present through her munegunge of him – as manifest in the Wooing
Group texts Ureisun of God and Wohunge.
Ureisun of God is a meditation devoted to a pursuit of intimacy with
Christ. This meditation at once provides the desiring anchoress with material
to create intimate access to Christ, yet also underscores her lack of closeness
to him.24 An image in Ureisun refers specifically to remembrance of Christ’s
good deeds, with an act of kissing that invokes Song of Songs 1:1 and 8:1:
‘hwi ne cusse ich þe sweteliche ine goste . wiþ swete munegunge of þine god
deden?’ (why do I not kiss you sweetly in spirit with sweet remembrance
of your good deeds?) (p. 7, lines 79–81).25 It is a statement founded on the
anchoress’s or Christ’s absence: the anchoress does not kiss Christ sweetly in
spirit, but asks why she does not. This is a technique employed throughout
Ureisun of God, with negative statements prefaced by the interrogative ‘hwi’.26
Yet, in denying this intimacy, she conversely creates the potential for such
contact. Kissing her Lover in remembrance of his good deeds is an act at
once unattainable yet tantalizingly within reach. Anselm of Canterbury’s
(1033–1109) ‘Oratio ad Christum’, the authentic Anselmian prayer which is
closest in devotional focus and imagery to Ureisun of God, also refers to
remembrance of Christ’s good deeds:27
24 See, for example, her expressions of estrangement from Christ: p. 5, line 21 and p. 7,
lines 85–6. The distance between anchoress and Christ in Ureisun of God has also been
touched upon by Caroline Cole, ‘The Integrity of Text and Context in the Prayers of
British Library Cotton MS Nero A. XIV’, Neophilologisches Mitteilungen civ (2003),
85–94 (91).
25 ‘Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth’ (1:1); ‘Who shall give thee to me for my
brother, sucking the breasts of my mother, that I may find thee without, and kiss thee,
and now no man may despise me?’ (8:1)
26 See, for example: p. 6, lines 48–62; p. 7, lines 77–9; and p. 9, lines 149–60.
27 Anselm is one of the Ancrene Wisse author’s named sources. Through the Orationes
sive meditationes especially, Anselm was also a key contributor to the Psalter-based
meditative tradition within which the Wooing Group is situated. See R. W. Southern,
Saint Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought, 1059–c.
1130 (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 38–9; and R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a
Landscape (Cambridge, 1990), p. 102.
84
Ad hoc, clementissime, tendit haec oratio mea, haec memoria et meditatio
beneficiorum tuorum, ut accendam in me tuum amorem.
(Most gentle Lord,/ my prayer tends towards this – / that by remembering
and meditating/ on the good things you have done/ I may be enkindled with
your love.)28
Notably, the convergence of memory with spiritual kissing in Ureisun of

God is non-existent in the Anselmian prayer. Unlike Anselm’s meditator, the
anchoress’s reading Ureisun of God couples her remembrance of Christ’s good
deeds with intimate tactile contact with her Lover.
Kissing is not entirely absent in Anselm’s meditation, however, and to
fully understand the techniques of re-presenting Christ in Ureisun of God it
will be useful to pause on the work of both Anselm and the Ancrene Wisse
author. An imagined kissing of Christ in remembrance of him is important
in Ancrene Wisse. As mentioned, in Part III the author adjures the anchoress
to kiss the wound-places on the crucifix she has available in the anchorhold
in munegunge of the Lord’s ‘soðe wunden’ (true wounds) (54: 250–2).
Although there is scant surviving information on the visual images inside
the thirteenth-century anchorhold used to nurture the anchoress’s devotional
literacy, this reference is one of the few indications in Ancrene Wisse itself.29
The use of crucifixes in stimulating remembrance is also made clear in the
opening of Anselm’s ‘Oratio ad sanctam crucem’:
Sancta crux, per quam nobis ad memoriam crux illa reducitur, in qua dominus
noster IESUS Christus nos per mortem suam a morte aeterna, in quam omnes
misere tendebamus, ad vitam aeternam, quam peccando perdideramus, resus-
citavit[.] (11)
(Holy Cross,/ which calls to mind the cross/ whereon our Lord Jesus Christ
died,/ to bring us back from that eternal death/ to which our misery was
leading us,/ to the eternal life we had lost by sinning.) (p. 102, lines 1–6)
In Ancrene Wisse, the anchoress is invited to inscribe the crucifix with her
kisses in an act of remembrance, and through this act to re-present Christ’s
wounds in the anchorhold. A parallel can be made with ‘Oratio ad Christum’,
where the Anselmian meditator desires to kiss the ‘loca vulnerum’ on Christ’s
body (8). Though both Anselm and the Ancrene Wisse author make clear that
these are not the true wounds – merely the blank markers of place (‘loca
28 Anselm of Canterbury, Orationes sive meditationes, in S. Anselmi Cantuariensis

Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, 6 vols, iii (Stuttgart, 1968), 7.
Translation from The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, trans. Benedicta Ward
(Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 94, lines 39–41. All subsequent references are to this edition
and translation.
29 The anchoress also had images and relics of saints in her anchorhold, as suggested in
Part I of Ancrene Wisse (8: 60–3). See further Millett, ed., Ancrene Wisse, II, 19: 1/60–3.
85
Ayoush Lazikani
vulnerum’ / ‘wundestuden’) – the wounds are still invoked as a physical pres-
ence in the anchorhold, and inspire the intimate affective-somatic response
of the anchoress’s kissing. Despite the anchoress’s inability to kiss the actual
lesions, the authors encourage her to achieve a semi-witnessing of and semi-
contact with the wounds. In Ureisun of God, the anchoress is not kissing
Christ in spirit in an act of remembrance; but, in her imagining and voicing
of her absence from the kiss, Christ is made almost present.
Two assertions in the opening of Wohunge refer to remembrance of Christ.
Echoing the hymn Dulcis Iesu memoria and the language of delectability
that pervades the Canticles, munegunge is linked to an experience of Christ’s
sweetness in the opening lines of the meditation: ‘Swetter is munegunge of
þe þen mildeu o muðe.’ (Sweeter is remembrance of you than honeydew in
the mouth) (p. 20, lines 3–5).30 This parallels the anchoress desiring to kiss
sweetly in sweet remembrance in Ureisun of God, with the two texts possibly
written by the same author.31 The role of taste and other forms of sensory
perception in medieval meditative, contemplative and penitential texts is a
subject too large for the scope of this present essay, but it is important to
note that the above statement in Wohunge stimulates the anchoress’s sensory
apprehension of Christ through remembrance of him.32 Like the speaker of
Psalm 33: 9 (‘O taste, and see that the Lord is sweet: blessed is the man
that hopeth in him’), the anchoress is invited to taste her Lord. The Eucha-
ristic wafer, consumed in remembrance of the Lord, suffuses her body with
his flesh; and remembrance of Christ through meditation allows her Lover,
in all his sweetness, to come into her mouth and become palpable on her
tongue.33 The anchoress’s aural and gustatory senses combine in this instance.
With the echo of the hymn Dulcis Iesu memoria and the tasting of the sweet
Lord, the anchoress engages in a sensory immersion in her Lover through
remembrance.
30 On Dulcis Iesu memoria, see Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle
Ages (Oxford, 1968), p. 174. See especially Song of Songs 4:3, 4:11, 5:1, 5:15 and 6:3.
31 Denis Renevey suggests a ‘close authorial relationship’ between the two meditations:
‘The Moving of the Soul: The Functions of Metaphors of Love in the Writings of
Richard Rolle and Antecedent Texts of the Mediaeval Mystical Tradition’ (unpublished
doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1993), p. 84.
32 See Gordon Rudy, Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages (New York
and London, 2002), especially p. 62 on taste in Bernard of Clairvaux’s (d. 1153) writing;
and Rosemary Drage Hale, ‘“Taste and See, for God is Sweet”: Sensory Perception
and Memory in Medieval Christian Mystical Experience’, in Vox Mystica: Essays on
Medieval Mysticism in Honour of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett
with Thomas H. Bestul, Janet Goebel and William F. Pollard (Cambridge, 1995), pp.
3–14. See also Mary Carruthers, ‘Sweetness’, Speculum 81 (2006), 999–1013.
33 On female tasting of the Eucharistic wafer, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful
Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond
(Philadelphia, PA, 2007), pp. 4–5; and Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious
Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA, 1987), especially pp. 76–7.
86
In the second instance of munegunge in Wohunge, the meditator refers to
the hardness of a heart that does not melt in remembrance of Christ: ‘Hwat
herte is swa hard þet ne mei to melte i þe munegunge of þe?’ (What heart is
so hard that it cannot melt in remembrance of you?) (p. 20, lines 6–8). The
image of a melting heart is presented in other thirteenth-century devotional
texts as the appropriate, sensitive affective response to the Passion or to the
witnessing of sin. For example, the author of Hali Meiðhad, the epistle on
virginity associated with the Wooing Group in their textual history, declares
that a heart should melt on seeing a virgin fall into lechery:
Þet dreori dede on ende 3eueð þet deaðes dunt. Weila, þet reowðe! Ne
acwikeð neauer meiðhad efter þet wunde. Wei! Þe sehe þenne hu þe engles
beoð isweamet, þe seoð hare suster se seorhful[l]iche aueallet, ant te deoflen
hoppin ant kenchinde beaten honden to[g]ederes, stani were his heorte 3ef ha
ne mealte i teares.34
(That sad deed at the end gives death’s blow. Alas, what pity! Maidenhood
never revives after that wound. Alas! Anyone who could see how the angels
are grieved, who see their sister so sorrowfully fallen, and the devils hopping
and laughingly beating their hands together, stony were his heart if it did not
melt in tears.)
Otherwise, it is an unfeeling, ‘stani’, heart – recalling the unimpressionable

heart made of ‘stone of adamant’ earlier in this epistle (p. 18, lines 28–32).
The imagery of stony versus tear-melting hearts is also found in the Anglo-
Norman text ‘Les lamentations Nostre Dame’, a prose text based on the
Pseudo-Bernardine Planctus.35 The witness who fails to participate affectively
in the Passion is figured in this text as having a heart harder than rock or
stone: ‘Allas! Nu poums ben dire que nus avoms les quers plus durs ke pere’
(‘Alas! We may well say that we have hearts harder than rock’) (pp. 190–1).
The anguished Mary, on the other hand, is said to ‘liquefy’ or ‘melt’ in tears,
using the verbs moiller and fundrer:
plureit si parfundement ke sembleit qu’ele deveit tute fundrer en lermes e qu’ele
moillout tut le cors sun enfant e la pere en ert tute moillé.
([she] was weeping so bitterly it seemed she must be melting in tears; she
wetted her child’s whole body, and the rocks were all wet.) (pp. 192–3)
34 Hali Meiðhad, ed. Bella Millett, EETS o.s. 284 (1982), p. 8, lines 20–5.
35 The late thirteenth-century date of the two earliest manuscripts suggests that this
Anglo-Norman text may have been composed later in the century than the anchoritic
texts, but it is included here as an analogue. For dating of the surviving manuscripts
and background to the text, see ‘Cher alme’: Texts of Anglo-Norman Piety, ed. Tony
Hunt and trans. Jane Bliss (Tempe, AZ, 2010), p. 181. Hunt and Bliss use the text of
‘Les lamentations Nostre Dame’ in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 374, with corrections
from Cambridge, Emmanuel Coll., MS 106 (I. 4. 31); they date MS 374 to s.xiii2, and
MS 106 to s. xivm. References are to this edition and translation.
87
Ayoush Lazikani
In Wohunge, remembrance of Christ enables this precious melting. His pres-
ence through remembrance liquefies the anchoress’s heart, not unlike Mary,
who dissolves into tears when present at her son’s torture. Later in Wohunge,
in viewing and participating in the Passion at the moment the events occur,
the anchoress’s breaking heart is linked with her near-liquescence as her own
eyes ‘flowen al o water’ (p. 33, lines 490–1). The anchoress’s affective partici-
pation in Passion scenes in the Wooing Group is thus marked by a shifting
temporal framework, a subject to which this essay now turns in its focus
on the anchoritic reader’s temporal perception in two Wooing Group texts:
Wohunge and the editorially titled On Lofsong of ure Lefdi.36
As Catherine Innes-Parker observes, On Lofsong of ure Lefdi is ‘a form
of confession’.37 After the speaker confesses her sins to the Virgin Mary,
she prays for the Holy Mother’s intercession by invoking details of Christ’s
suffering upon Earth – a key passage that departs from the confessional
mould of the meditation as a whole. The hallmarks of Anselmian meditation
are again unmistakable. This passage provides images for the anchoress to
ingest in a slow-moving, peaceful and deep meditation, of the kind Anselm
outlines in his Preface to the Orationes sive meditationes and in his letter to
Countess Mathilda (3–4):
Ich bide þe 7 biseche þe 7 halsi ȝif me howeð hit; bi his flech founge of þine
eadie bodie . bi his iborenesse. bi his eadi festunge iþe wildernesse . bi þe
herde hurtes 7 þe unwurðe wowes ðet he for us sunful willeliche þolede. bi his
deað-fule grure. 7 bi his blodie swote. bi his eadi beoden in hulles him one.
bi his nimunge . 7 bindunge. bis his ledunge forð. bi al þet me him demde. bi
his cloðes wrixlunge. Nu red. nu hwit. him on hokerunge. bi his scornunge. 7
bi his spotlunge. 7 bufettunge. 7 his heliunge. bi þe þornene crununge. bi ðe
kineȝerde of rode. him of scornunge. bi his owune rode. on his softe schuldres.
so herde druggunge. bi þe dulte neiles. bi þe sore wunden; bi þe holie rode.
bi his side openunge . bi his blodi Rune þet ron inne monie studen . In umbe
keoruunge . in his blod swetunge. in his pine þornene crununge. erest in his
one hond 7 seoððen in his oðer. olast in his side þurlunge wið ute sore wunde.
Ȝet ase halewen weneð. þet to-ðe blod-rune. was in his ereste. nimunge in þe
feste bindunge. þet tet blod wrong ut et his eadie neiles. ich halsi þe þet ðu
biseche him bi his schome. bi his sor. bi his deað on rode. bi al þet he seide
wrohte 7 þolede in eorðe. (pp. 17–18, lines 40–67)
(I bid you and beseech you and entreat, if it is appropriate for me, by his
flesh conceived from your blessed body, by his birth, by his blessed fasting
in the wilderness, by the hard hurts and the undeserved woes that he will-
36 The title was first given in Old English Homilies, First Series, ed. Richard Morris, EETS
o.s. 29, 34 (1867–68).
37 Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd and the Tradition of Affective
Devotion: Rethinking Text and Audience’, in Milieu and Context, ed. Susannah Mary
Chewning (Cardiff), pp. 96–122 (p. 107).
88
fully suffered for us sinful, by his deadly terror, and by his bloody sweat, by
his blessed prayers alone in the hills, by his capture, and binding, and by his
leading forth, by all that they condemned him of, by his changing clothes,
now red, now white, in mockery of him, by his scorning, by his spitting, and
buffeting, and his blindfolding, by the crowning of thorns, by the royal sceptre
of reed in scorn of him, by his own Cross, on his soft shoulders, toiling so
hard, by the blunt nails, by the sore wounds, by the holy Cross, by his side
opening, by the bloody stream that ran in many places, in his circumcision, in
his blood sweating, in his painful thorn-crowning, first in one hand, and then
in his other, lastly in his side piercing, without mentioning the sore wound, yet
as saints believe, the running-blood was in his first capture in the fast binding,
so that the blood wrung out of his blessed nails. I entreat you that you beseech
him by his shame, by his sorrow, by his death on the Cross, by all that he said,
worked and suffered on earth. […])
There is a broad chronological framework to this passage. It begins with

Christ’s birth from Mary’s blessed body, his fasting in the wilderness, his
bloody sweat on the night of his capture (Luke 22: 44) and his solitary
prayers on the hill. There is also a general chronological progression through
the core events of the Passion, in addition to the unified syntactical frame-
work through the repetition of ‘bi’.
And yet, this passage works towards breaking free from a chronological
Passion narrative. The reference to Christ’s ‘umbe keoruunge’, an exeget-
ical commonplace foreshadowing the shedding of his blood on the Cross
(Luke 2: 21, 35), appears after the speaker has dwelt on the Holy Cross and
the Wounded Side; the speaker then returns to the details of the Crucifix-
ion.38 Aspects of torture are also repeated, notably the ‘þornene crununge’,
the various manifestations of spilling blood and the blood-sweat repeated
after moments of the Crucifixion are imaged. After reaching the apparent
climax of the Side Wound, the speaker actively returns to the first moment
of Christ’s capture, a meditative manoeuvre lent potency by invoking the
testimonies of saints (‘ase halewen weneð’). Using Vincent Gillespie’s terms
on late-medieval mystical writing, the author of Lofsong of ure Lefdi gestures
towards deconstructing the chronological narrative in order to release the
anchoress, and himself, from the ‘syntax’ of both thought and language that
entraps the experience of these images ‘within systems of linear causality and
temporal sequence’.39 Liberated, at least partly, from this syntax, the anchoress
engages freely with the infinite detail forming Christ’s life-long torment. The
38 Caroline Walker Bynum has explored the visual connection made between Christ’s
circumcision and his wounding during the Passion. See her Fragmentation and
Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York,
1991), pp. 86–7, and her ‘Figure 3.3’ on p. 89.
39 Vincent Gillespie, ‘Postcards from the Edge: Interpreting the Ineffable in the Middle
English Mystics’, in Looking in Holy Books (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 307–37, at p. 318.
89
Ayoush Lazikani
potentially isolable images allow a high level of flexibility within the medita-
tive process. As Gillespie surmises:
The abstracted image in a literary text […] is less dependent upon its place
in the syntax of the text as a whole. It remains a signifier, but its signified is
no longer determined by its immediate linguistic or narrative context. Thus it
becomes possible to handle the image in more complex ways, to read into the
image more profoundly by using it as a catalyst to a chain of significations
related to but not predicated upon the imaginative decorum of the source or
host image.40
Each image in Lofsong of ure Lefdi – the circumcision, the pouring blood,
the bloody sweat, the praying Christ, the Holy Mother’s body, the Cross, the
soaked clothing – is a catalyst to a long ‘chain of significations’. Not entirely
fettered by the narrative context, the anchoress can develop the signifying
power of each image to its absolute potential. Disrupting chronology to
embrace a series of potentially isolable images of the Passion, the text there-
fore encourages the anchoress to experience ‘a shift from a diachronic to a
synchronic perception of the temporal reality’.41 Although emphasizing that
Christ died only once (Hebrews 9:27–28), liturgical celebration, in its cyclical
nature, creates a perpetual cycle of Christ’s pain and rebirth. In Lofsong of
ure Lefdi, the anchoress is implicated in the ever-moving cycle; she is always
suffering with Christ, entering the depths of each image of her Lover’s pain.42
At its heart, Wohunge is a meditation on Christ’s lovability. This is encap-
sulated in the incantatory refrain repeated by the anchoress throughout the
meditation: ‘A iesu mi swete iesu leue þat te luue of þe beo al mi likinge.’
(Ah Jesus, my sweet Jesus, dear, the love of you is all my delight) (p. 21,
lines 55–7ff). As Bella Millett notes, it has a twofold structure in line with
this focus: first, an outline of Christ’s ‘luuewurði’ qualities, and second, an
account of the sufferings he undertakes to deserve the anchoress’s love (p. 20,
lines 12–13).43 Like the opening of Ureisun of God, the incantatory opening of
Wohunge uses imagery from the Canticles (4:3, 4:11, 5:1) and Psalm 18:10 to
40 Vincent Gillespie, ‘Strange Images of Death: The Passion in Later Medieval English
Devotional and Mystical Writing’, in Looking in Holy Books, pp. 209–39, at p. 223.
41 Gillespie, ‘Strange Images of Death’, p. 220.
42 Annie Sutherland spotlights ‘the dual linear and circular impetus of the liturgy’, which
‘reminds us of a God who, in his perpetual activity, lies beyond the conventions of
linear time’. See Annie Sutherland, ‘Julian of Norwich and the Liturgy’, in A Companion
to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 88–98 (pp. 92–3).
Both Sutherland and Denise Nowakowski Baker demonstrate a comparable escape
from chronology in Julian of Norwich’s works. See Sutherland, ‘Julian of Norwich
and the Liturgy’, particularly p. 95; and Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s
Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton, NJ, 1994), especially pp. 49 and 55.
43 Bella Millett, ‘The “Conditions of Eligibility” in Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd’, in Milieu
and Context, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Cardiff), pp. 26–47 (p. 26).
90
invoke Christ’s sweetness, culminating in the honeydew of Christ’s remem-
brance in the mouth discussed earlier in this essay: ‘Iesu swete iesu. mi druð.
mi derling. mi drihtin. mi healend. mi huniter. mi haliwei. Swetter is mune-
gunge of þe þen mildeu o muðe.’ (Jesus sweet Jesus, my beloved, my darling,
my lord, my saviour, my honey-drop, my balm. Sweeter is remembrance of
you than honeydew in the mouth) (p. 20, lines 1–5). In the lengthy account
of the Passion, the anchoress, her mouth now imbued with the sweet Christ,
engages in a relentless remembrance of him – not unlike that encouraged by
Goscelin, mentioned at the start of this essay. Her Lover’s torment during
the Crucifixion is recreated and acted in exhaustive detail. Unlike Lofsong of
ure Lefdi, his suffering is related chronologically. The speaker draws herself
into the machinations of torture at the moment that they unfold ‘bifore þe
princes’:
Siðen bifore pilat hu þu was naket bunden faste to þe piler. […] þer þu wes
for mi luue wið cnotti swepes swungen swa þat ti luueliche lich mihte beo to
torn 7 to rent. […] Siðen o þin heaued wes set te crune of scharpe þornes.
þat wið eaueriche þorn wrang utte reade blod of þin heali heaued. Siðen ȝette
buffetet 7 to dunet i þe heaued wið þe red ȝerde þat te was ear in honde giuen
þe on hokerringe. A hwat schal i nu don? Nu min herte mai tobreke. min ehne
flowen al o water. A nu is mi lefmon demd for to deien. A nu mon ledes him
forð to munte caluarie to þe cwalm stowe. A lo he beres his rode up on his
bare schuldres. (p. 33, lines 472–95)
(then before Pilate, how you were naked bound fast to the pillar […] There for
my love you were flogged with knotted whips, so that your lovely body might
be torn and rent apart […] Then on your head was set a crown of sharp thorns,
so that with every thorn the red blood wrung out from your holy head. Then
moreover you were buffeted and beaten in the head with the reed sceptre that
was before put in your hand in mockery. Ah, what shall I now do? Now my
heart may break; my eyes overflow with water. Ah now my lover is condemned
to death. Ah now men lead him forth to Mount Calvary to the place of execu-
tion. Ah lo, he bears his Cross upon his bare shoulders.)
The parataxis of ‘siðen’ ensures that no facet of Christ’s torture – whether

the thorns, the buffeting, the mocking, the bearing of the Cross on his ‘bare
schuldres’ – is relegated to an inferior position in the anchoress’s medita-
tion. Beyond this consistent parataxis, however, there is deliberate inconsist-
ency of tense. Christ’s Passion is expressed at first through the past simple
tense: ‘was’, ‘wes’, ‘wrang’. After the anchoress’s heart breaks at the sight, the
Passion is subsequently expressed in the present tense: ‘Nu min herte mai
tobreke. [...] A nu is mi lefmon demd for to deien. A nu mon ledes him
forð to munte caluarie to þe cwalm stowe. A lo he beres his rode up on his
bare schuldres.’ The scene has moved temporally closer to the anchoress. She
becomes implicated as a witness, present at the moment the events occur. The
chronological framework, and with it the anchoress’s diachronic temporal
91
Ayoush Lazikani
perception, continue after the change of tense. But the gap of time separating
the anchoress from her Lover is made smaller, the immediacy of his pain
heightened. As this scene takes place, the speaker’s affective response occurs
in direct conjunction with the events – in contrast to the incantatory Passion
sequence of On Lofsong of ure Louerde, and the Passion passage of Lofsong
of ure Lefdi, where the stimulation of affective response is delayed until the
imagery of Christ’s suffering has been exhausted.44 The anchoress seems to be
among those weeping friends who accompany Christ (p. 33, lines 498–500).
However, she moves from direct expression to Christ (‘þu’) to speaking about
him in the third person (‘him’, ‘his’). Having been brought close enough to
imagine Christ’s voice and to speak directly to him, she is now pushed back
into an observational role.45 Her Lover is, after all, only a memory; she has
still not gained complete access to him. It is a future, potential encounter
facilitated by munegunge. The anchoress attempts to insert her present self
into the past event of the Crucifixion, tampering with this critical memory
to bring Christ closer to her.
For the anchoress reading the Wooing Group, munegunge enables the near-
presence of her Lover. She creates a space of love-remembrance in her cell,
immersing herself in the Spousal Lamb’s sweetness and pain. Existing as she
does in the perpetual cycle of the liturgy, she is forever crucified with him,
and attempts through her shifting temporal perception in these texts to gain
close insight and access to Christ’s past-present suffering. In his twenty-sixth
sermon, Aelred explains that the feasts of the Church have been put in place
for reasons of remembrance:
Ob hanc causam, fratres, institutae sunt istae festiuitates in Ecclesia, ut, per
hoc quod modo eius natiuitatem repraesentamus, modo eius passionem, modo
eius resurrectionem, modo eius ascensionem, semper sit recens in memoria
nostra illa mira pietas, illa mira suauitas, illa mira caritas quam in nobis per
haec omnia ostendit. (p. 210)
([…] these feasts have been established in the Church, so that by representing
now his birth, now his passion, now his resurrection, now his ascension,
there may always be fresh in our memory the wonderful loving-kindness, the
wonderful gentleness, the wonderful charity that he showed towards us by all
of these.) (p. 355)
44 For the incantatory Passion sequence in On Lofsong of ure Louerde, see p. 10, lines
12–16.
45 There is a persistent adjustment in pronoun use between ‘þu’ and ‘he’ throughout this
text, suggesting that the anchoress is engaged in a kind of wave motion in her viewing
of the Passion, constantly moving forwards to Christ only to be forcibly pushed back.
This alteration in pronoun use has also been noted by Brown, ‘Subject, Object and
Mantra’, pp. 76–7.
92
Remembrance of Christ is pervasive in the anchoress’s existence and is not
stimulated solely during feasts. Through her remembrance in each hour of
her life in the anchorhold, she works to harness Christ’s compassion (pietas),
gentleness or sweetness (suauitas) and love (caritas). In her grave-cell, the
anchoress attempts to re-present the absent Lover until, in death, she can
leap into his real and eternal embrace.46
46 For the term ‘grave-cell’, see Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the
Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p. 59. For the image of leaping after death, see
Wohunge, p. 36, lines 593–7; see also Ureisun of God, p. 9, lines 162–4.
93
6
Gendered Strategies of Time and Memory in

the Writing of Julian of Norwich and the
Recluse of Winchester
Liz Herbert McAvoy
I n the second section of her modernist novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia

Woolf documents the slow decay of the Ramsay family’s abandoned holiday
home during the course of the First World War, a decay that unfolds imper-
ceptibly in its cold solitariness. Both unseen and unheard, the slow deteriora-
tion takes on its own temporal and spatial dynamics:
But slumber and sleep though it might there came later in the summer ominous
sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt, which, with their
repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and cracked the tea-cups. Now
and again some glass tinkled in the cupboard as if a giant voice had shrieked
so loud in its agony that tumblers stood inside a cupboard vibrated too. Then
again silence fell; and then, night after night, and sometimes in plain mid-day
when the roses were bright and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there
seemed to drop into this silence this indifference, this integrity, the thud of
something falling.1
In this section, entitled ‘Time Passes’, the so-called march of time is visible
and measurable only in terms of a vacated and exilic space along with its
disintegrating objects: rhythms of sounds and silences, slumber, sleep and
waking, the returning movement of the sun on the roses of the wallpaper and
catching the folds of the dust-ridden, long-forgotten shawl. Whilst outside in
the world at large time is measured in battles and bloodshed, in winning and
losing and, ultimately, in living or dying, within this abandoned domestic
space, it is all but invisible; in the words of Henri Lefebvre:
1 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 145.
95
Liz Herbert McAvoy
[Time is] no longer visible to us, no longer intelligible. It cannot be constructed.
It is consumed, exhausted, and that is all. It leaves no traces. It is concealed
in space, hidden under a pile of debris to be disposed of as soon as possible.2
Here, Lefebvre could well be writing about Woolf ’s configuration of a now

that incorporates a lost past, a meaningless present and a hopeless future all
swept up in the materiality of a left domestic space from which the world is
now exiled: for Lefebvre, time finds itself ‘inscribed in space’, and, in turn,
space becomes ‘the lyrical and tragic script of natural time’.3 For Woolf,
however, whilst initially presenting the house’s decay as a distant, domestic
echo of the devastations of the First World War, in fact, that decay articulates
the slip into the void brought about by the sudden and insupportable death
of Mrs Ramsay: maternal archetype, family life-force, owner of the aban-
doned shawl, a woman once with ‘stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with
cyclamen and wild violets’.4 With a jolt it becomes clear that for her family
and friends – for the reader too, perhaps – Mrs Ramsay was the ‘feminine’
space of the home in which the ‘masculine’ time of her husband, her family,
her friends and the war-torn era asserted itself, and thus a woman herself
overwritten as a type of ‘lyrical and tragic script’.
The notion of the woman as an embodiment of a dwelling-space that
renders time – and therefore memory – visible and meaningful is not,
however, a discourse restricted to twentieth-century modernist configura-
tions. Indeed, the literature of the Middle Ages, with its legacies of Clas-
sical philosophy and biblical precedent, is redolent with such representation,
finding its zenith, perhaps, in those texts associated with the enclosed and
private space of the anchorhold. Anchoritic poetics are fully imbricated with
body–space correlations within which the materiality of the four walls of
enclosure conflates with the fleshly body within, producing in the process
another ‘lyrical and tragic script’ in which the female body constitutes a space
ordered by male-authored ‘anchoritic’ time.
This is clearly testified to in the writing of the Cistercian abbot Aelred of
Rivaulx (d. 1167), examined briefly by Lazikani in the previous essay, who,
in a letter of guidance to his anchorite sister, extols the virtues of silence
and fasting as appropriate practices of bodily containment for her during the
forty days of Lent. Here, Aelred configures his sister as a type of ‘dwelling-
place’, a sacred space forged from her own ascetic practices upon which is
imposed the linearity of a masculine conception of time that again has exile
at its core:
2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford,

1991), pp. 95–6.
3 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 95.
4 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 18.
96
Julian of Norwich and the Recluse of Winchester
[H]aec tamen quadragesimalis obseruatio magnum in se continet sacra-
mentum. Primus locus habitationis nostrae paradisus fuit, secundus mundus
iste plenus aerumnis, tertius in caelo cum angelicis spiritibus. Significant autem
isti quadraginta dies totum tempus ex quo pulsus est Adam de paradiso usque
ad ultimum diem in quo plene liberabimur ex hoc exilio.
(This Lenten fast of forty days also constitutes a great sacrament: our first
dwelling-place was in Paradise; our second is this world and is filled with hard-
ship; our third dwelling will be in heaven with the angels. Now these forty days
of Lent represent the entire span of time from Adam’s expulsion from Paradise
until the last day, when we shall be finally liberated from this exile of ours).5
Here too, Aelred is clear about the anchorhold – and his sister as its occu-
pant – as constituting the memory of the paradisial originary space and,
as such, always already embodying the potential for a male (and, by exten-
sion, cultural) ‘homecoming’ to that same space. However, this space is not
without its dangers: Aelred’s words also serve to remind his sister of her
alternative identity as daughter of Eve and of her anchoritic duty to atone
for the Fall; through her practices, therefore, she must re-member (that is to
say, recall and reconstitute) the originary space within which that first home
may once more be accessed.
Up to this point, Aelred’s text has been directly concerned with a woman’s
‘natural’ inclination to incontinence, warning his sister of the dangers of
having, for example, ‘mens non solum peruagatione dissoluatur’ (‘a mind
[that] roams at random’); ‘lingua tota die per uicos et ciuitates … discurrat’
(‘a tongue [that] runs about all day through towns and villages’); and gossipy,
vulgar friends at the anchorhold window whose lewd and poisonous stories
will result only in her being ‘captiuam libidinis daemonibus illudendam
exponant’ (‘ensnared by her own sensuality, to the mockery of the demons’).6
This, then, is the antifeminist logic, the patriarchal anxiety that drives his
enjoinder regarding his sister’s Lenten fasting which, for Aelred, ‘Licet autem
religionis comes semper debeat esse ieiunium, sine quo castitas tuta esse
non potest’ (‘should go hand in hand with the religious life since without
it chastity would be constantly exposed to danger’).7 Like her anchorhold,
Aelred’s sister is required to be a closed vessel, an empty space to be filled by
discourse, and the site of memory in which past, present and future intersect.
As such, Aelred’s unnamed sister, operating within her anchorhold, func-
tions, like Mrs Ramsay in Woolf ’s text, as a spatial abstraction onto which
5 Aelred of Rivaulx, ‘De institutione inclusarum’, in Aelredi Rieveallensis Opera Omnia,

ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, CCCM i (Turnhout, 1971), pp. 635–82 (p. 647). The
translations are taken from ‘A Rule of Life for a Recluse’, in Aelred of Rivaulx: Treatises
and Pastoral Prayer, ed. and trans. Mary Paul Macpherson (Kalamazoo, MI, 1971), pp.
41–102 (p. 58).
6 De institutione, p. 638 (Rule, pp. 46–7).
7 De institutione, p. 647 (Rule, p. 58).
97
Liz Herbert McAvoy
is written and into which is poured the memory of the lost ‘dwelling-place’
and the persistent desire for a return to it.
The concept of the female body as an abstraction or ‘envelope’ into which
cultural ideologies of time and space can be poured is one which has long
preoccupied contemporary feminist thought. In particular, Luce Irigaray,
writing more than 900 years after Aelred produced his treatise for his sister,
argues that a woman’s enclosure by traditional patriarchal philosophies serves
to generate a self-loathing and self-denial which are easily appropriated in
support of the patriarchal machine.8 As such, a woman is readily caught up
within a hegemonic phallic logic that retains her as a vessel to be defined by
and subjected to ‘the conditions of production of the work of man […], his
genealogy’.9 In other words, women are enclosed within a linear and time-
bound history of male logic and resultant genealogical interpellation that
render them simultaneously subjected and abjected. If the workings of men
manifest themselves in the constraints of time, women become the space
upon which those constraints have been traditionally imposed. Therefore, a
man’s ability to operate within the world, and to place himself within his own
history (in what Irigaray terms his espacement), is possible only if women
constitute his ‘space’ and become his place of dwelling – for his needs, his
discourse, his home. In fact, for Irigaray, ‘[t]raditionally, spacing [espace-
ment] is created, or occupied, by man, child, house-work, cooking. Not by
the woman herself for herself.’10
Writing elsewhere in similar vein, Irigaray argues that women are accord-
ingly denied access to spiritual transcension within western traditions because
of the hegemony of patriarchal, monotheistic religions which require the
woman to be a space to facilitate male transcension.11 Both female espacement
and ‘divinity’ are therefore crafted within and by male paradigms, making
women mere ‘envelopes’, rather than self-defined beings with their own
rhythms, spatial dynamics and routes to transcendence. In Aelred’s words
to his sister, therefore, in which he exhorts her to a superlative statement of
deprivation, both for and as Lent, we recognize an identity-production at
work that serves to shape the silent sister not only as a suitable dwelling-place
for Aelred’s own espacement, but also for that of his genealogical inherit-
ance, that is to say as the religious memory of (his) culture, based on phallic
notions of time and space. How this played out within female anchoritism is
neatly summed up in the words of Laura Saetveit Miles: ‘[the female ancho-
rite] was expected to … bring a new sense of holiness to the heart of the
8 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill
(London and New York, 2004).
11 Luce Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’, in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New
York, 1993), pp. 57–72.
98
community.’12 The woman recluse was thus rendered the enclosed embodi-
ment of cultural memory and, as Mary Carruthers reminds us, ‘Memoria
refers not to how something is communicated, but to what happens once
one has received it.’13
The female anchorite as constituting the site of patriarchal espacement or
‘dwelling’ is also everywhere apparent in the early-thirteenth-century guid-
ance text, Ancrene Wisse (also examined by Lazikani), a text derived in part
from Aelred’s own treatise and similarly directed – at least in its first incep-
tions – at an audience of enclosed women.14 Like Aelred, its author inter-
pellates his audience as always already bearing the potential for unruliness,
bodily incontinence and socio-religious disruption and thus needing to be
sealed up in order to produce the right sort of container for patriarchal
espacement. Indeed, on one occasion the author directly cites Aelred as his
source:
Ne schal ha for hire lif witen hire al cleane, ne halden riht hire chastete, wiðuten
twa þinges, as Seint Ailred þe abbat wrat to his suster. Þet an is pinsunge i
flesch wið feasten, wið wecchen, wið disceplines, wið heard werunge, heard
leohe, wið uuel, wið muchele swinkes. Þe oþer is heorte þeawes: deuotiun,
reowfulnesse, riht luue, eadmodnesse, ant uertuz oþre swucche.
([The anchoress] will not keep herself completely pure for life, or maintain her
chastity properly, without two things, as St Aelred the abbot wrote to his sister.
One is mortification of the flesh by fasting, by vigils, by scourgings, by coarse
clothing, hard beds, by illness, by heavy labour. The other is the virtues of
the heart: devotion, compassion, true love, humility, and other such virtues.)15
Here, the author imposes a range of tried-and-tested practices upon his

female audience to shape and reshape their bodies by means of self-harm and
self-deprivation, ‘for hire lif ’. In turn, such a perpetual reshaping endlessly
produces a suitable container, a dwelling-place for the author’s own espace-
ment, into which can be poured the ideals of virtue upon which it is predi-
12 Laura Saetveit Miles, ‘Space and Enclosure in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love’,
in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, 2008), pp.
154–65 (p. 155).
(Cambridge, 2008; 1st edn 1990), pp. 14–15.
14 Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College,
MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, EETS o.s. 325 (Oxford,
2005). For a modern English translation, see Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses,
ed. and trans. Bella Millett (Exeter, 2009). All quotations and translations will be
taken from these editions and the page numbers are the same in each case. For a
detailed account of the borrowings of the Ancrene Wisse author from Aelred, see
Aelred of Rievaulx’s De Institutione inclusarum: Two English Versions, ed. John Ayto
and Alexandra Barratt, EETS o.s. 287 (Oxford, 1984), pp. xxxviii–xliii.
15 Ancrene Wisse, 6. 11, p. 139.
99
Liz Herbert McAvoy
cated. That this is the case is soon confirmed by the Ancrene Wisse author,
who, in anticipation of Irigaray’s claim that women comprise the ‘containers,
or envelopes of identity’,16 inserts an addendum to his own version of Aelred’s
words, asking:
Hwa bredde eauer inwið hire fur þet ha ne bearnde? Pot þe walleð swiðe, nule
he beon ouerleden, oðer cald weater iwarpe þrin, ant brondes wiðdeahene? Þe
wombe pot, þe walled of metes ant [mare] of drunches, is se neh nehbur to
þet fulitohe lim þet ha dealeð þerwið þe brune of hire heate.
(Who has constantly fed the first [desire] inside her and not burned? If a pot is
boiling fiercely, doesn’t it need to be partly emptied, or have cold water poured
into it and the fires removed? The pot of the belly, boiling from food, and more
from drink, is such a close neighbor to the insubordinate part of the body that
it shares the burning of its heat with it.)17
Here, the purging of the ‘pot’ of the female body incorporates both the
stomach and the womb (its ‘neh nehbur’), providing a constant reminder of
that same body’s holistic need of purging. Such a reminder, in turn, allows
for the continual release of that body’s potential as (inherently unreliable)
container into which the stabilizing force of male discourse can pour. In this
way, it provides the necessary site for male espacement. Its job, however, is
never done.
A further configuration of the female body as site for male espacement
in which past, present and future converge appears in Part Two of Ancrene
Wisse, which deals with the need to guard the heart by closing up the ‘open-
ings’ of the five senses. This section famously culminates with a dramatic
exhortation for the enclosed women to dig their own graves a little each day
(‘schrapian euche dei þe earðe up of hare put þet ha schulen rotien in’ [‘scrape
up the earth each day from the grave in which they will rot’]), in the produc-
tion of yet another type of container: the grave.18 Here, the female anchorite,
occupying the spatial threshold between life and death, is doomed to the
perpetual and daily (re)production of a site that confirms her, like Lent, as
both a site of memory and its reincarnation in present practice.
As well as grave, of course, the anchorhold is also unequivocably a place
of regeneration.19 Like the tomb of the resurrected Christ himself, it doubles
as the divine womb: as the author explains, ‘Marie wombe ant þis þruh weren
his ancre-huses’ (Mary’s womb and this tomb were his [Christ’s] anchor-
16 Irigaray, Ethics, p. 9 (original emphasis).

19 For discussion of this, see the essays collected in Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs:
Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and
Marie Hughes Edwards (Cardiff, 2005).
100
houses).20 And, it is from this same womb/tomb that the enclosed woman will
be reborn into everlasting life, taking the aspirations of the community with
her. Just as Mary’s womb provided the first dwelling-place of Christ within
worldly temporality (and thus his own espacement), so the enclosed woman’s
body and its spatio-temporal location as threshold between heaven and earth
provides the dwelling-place also for divine discourse, to which culture can
then gain access. For Irigaray, however, the notion of woman-as-threshold
is nothing more than a ‘linguistic home that man has managed to substitute
even for his dwelling in a body, whether his own body or another’s’. Whilst a
man can achieve transcendence of his own body via the ‘construction mate-
rial’ of this substituted body, Irigaray argues that this material is not available
to the woman for her own use.21 However, when we turn to the writings of
female anchorites themselves, we find glimpses of how a female anchoritic
espacement of a woman’s own making can actually provide a ‘construction
material’ that is potentially available to her, as I shall argue here.
In a perceptive essay cited above, that focuses on the anchoritic space
inhabited by the late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century anchorite,
Julian of Norwich, Miles, drawing on Foucault, has identified the late-medi-
eval anchorhold as an intensely heterotopic space that combines both the
mundane here-and-now and the transcendent.22 According to Foucault, a
truly heterotopic space is disruptive in that it is able to generate within itself,
and ultimately become, ‘several spaces, several sites that are in themselves
incompatible’.23 Whilst for Aelred and the Ancrene Wisse author this incom-
patibility has to be resolved by means of bodily practices of self-harm and/or
deprivation in the production of a self-sacrificial ‘vessel’ in which they and
their ‘genealogical’ discourse may dwell, in the writings of female anchorites
we frequently see the deployment of a more subversive heterotopic space able
to further a less-mediated construction in which the woman may, indeed,
find her own espacement.24 For Miles, therefore, Julian’s cell is both an archi-
tectural space within the busy urban centre of Norwich and also a space of
otherworldly revelation and visionary insight, ultimately transformed into
visionary text by the enclosed woman herself.25 Rather than being an empty

22 Miles, ‘Space and Enclosure’, especially p. 156.
23 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, 1 (1986), 22–7
(24).
24 For a useful collection of essays, a good number of which deal with the issue of
visionary and/or enclosed space, see Carolyn Meussig and Ad Putter (eds), Envisaging
Heaven in the Middle Ages (London and New York, 2007).
25 For a more detailed examination of the influence upon Julian of her physical urban
surroundings see Cate Gunn, ‘“A recluse atte Norwyche”: Images of Medieval Norwich
and Julian’s Revelations’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy
(Cambridge, 2008), pp. 32–41.
101
Liz Herbert McAvoy
vessel for the containment of male discourse and espacement, then, Julian
and her anchorhold form a dynamic heterotopia within which the series of
intensely private, life-changing visions experienced as she lay ill in 1373 is
perpetually re-animated and re-membered in order to generate an equally
intense, private and constantly renewed understanding of those visions. As
Julian famously states: ‘This boke is begonne by Goddes gifte and his grace,
but it is not yet performed, as to my sight.’26 Julian’s ‘boke’ is, therefore, a
continuous rewriting; it is a perpetual performance of her own making, which
does not in any sense adhere to phallic notions of beginning, middle and
end. Nor does it rely upon the imposition of traditional temporal linearity
upon its multiple ‘feminine’ spaces for its coherence and authority, as I shall
demonstrate.
According to Liedeke Plate, women’s rewriting of male-authored narra-
tives and their genealogical heritages is a process of recuperation. Such a
process literally re-members (that is to say, puts together again) the past in
a wholly different way and is thus able to disrupt traditional phallic tempo-
rality and its shaping of space in order to generate another way of seeing
and understanding.27 Such a conception, whilst directed at late-twentieth-
century women’s rewriting of the ‘grand narratives’ of the past, nevertheless
provides a valuable insight into Julian of Norwich’s own assiduous rewritings
and re-memberings as she attempts to construct her own place from which
to best articulate and explain her visionary experiences.
Julian’s text takes the form of a detailed account of the sixteen visions she
experienced over three days and nights. These visions, she tells us, she had
prayed for as a much younger woman ‘wherein I might have more knowinge
of the bodily paines of our saviour’ and which, she adds, ‘I might have it
when I ware thirtieth yeare olde’.28 This, of course, is her representation of
a pre-visionary self, operating within the constraints of traditional (phallic)
temporality and space. When the sickness and visions arrive in 1373, when
she is indeed thirty years of age, the pain they engender (whether her own
or her empathetic experience of Christ’s) exceeds by far anything she could
ever have imagined or has ever experienced, so much so that she is driven
to admit: ‘if I had wiste what it had be, loth me had been to have preyed
it’.29 As such, therefore, in their very excess, and in their overlaying of past
and present, her visions remove her from a traditional linear time-frame and
26 The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Shown to a Devout Woman and A

Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (Turnhout, 2006),
86. 1–2, p. 379. All references will be to this edition.
27 Liedeke Plate, Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (New York
and London, 2011).
28 Revelation 2. 10–11; 32, pp. 127 and p. 129.
29 Revelation 17. 45–6, p. 183.
102
render her open to a space within which an inchoate and unframed mystical
time can take precedence.
Critical opinion has frequently pointed out the ways in which Julian’s early
description of her sick-room in Chapter Three of A Revelation clearly prefig-
ures the anchoritic space within which she will undertake a concerted and
protracted act of re-membering.30 Indeed, Julian’s later withdrawal into the
anchorhold, documented from 1394 onwards, was almost certainly spurred
by the 1373 experience, and likely made imperative by a secondary insight
into divine love in 1388 that clearly necessitated a wholly new version of her
text – and both a physical and textual re-enactment of the original space of
the visions in which to write it. The same can be said about the intense pain
invoked by her sickness, which, like mystical transportation, quickly eludes
any attempts to capture it in language. As Elaine Scarry argues of pain:
Nothing sustains its image in the world; nothing alerts us to the place it has
vacated. From the inarticulate it half emerges into speech and then quickly
recedes once more. Invisible in part because of its resistance to language, it is
also invisible because its own powerfulness ensures its isolation.31
Julian therefore struggles to articulate her pain, in the same way as the
mystical event evades linguistic fixing in time and place too. Instead, she
can present only the symptoms of her pain (she ‘langorid’ and ‘indured’; her
body was ‘dead from the middes downward’; her ‘most paine was shortnes of
winde and failing of life’)32 and the responses of others to it (‘My curate was
sent for to be at my ending’; ‘He set the crosse before my face’).33 Similarly,
she is given to articulate the ‘symptoms’ of mystical events (‘I saw the red
bloud trekile downe’; ‘he shewed a little thing the quantity of a haselnot’; ‘oure
curteyse lorde answered in shewing, full mistily, by a wonderful example of a
lorde that hath a servant’),34 rather than the inexplicable events themselves,
and Julian’s exegesis of them is thus continued throughout her lifetime as
she works on the Long Text.35 Both pain and vision in Julian’s text, therefore,
30 See, for example, Revelation 3. 24–5, p. 133: ‘it was alle darke aboute me in the chamber
as if it had ben night, save in the image of the crosse’. See also my discussion of this
in Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 64–5.
31 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York
and Oxford, 1985), pp. 60–1.
32 Revelation 3. 4, 14, 29, pp. 131–3.
33 Revelation 3. 17–18, p. 131.
34 Revelation 4. 1–2, p. 139; 5. 7, p. 139; 51. 1–2, p. 273.
35 There has been some debate about the chronology of Julian’s texts, although see
Nicholas Watson’s argument that A Vision Shown to a Devout Woman (the Short Text)
should be dated to the 1380s and A Revelation of Love (the Long Text) dated to the
remainder of Julian’s life (that is, up to her death after 1416). See Nicholas Watson, ‘The
Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, Speculum 68 (1993), 637–83.
103
Liz Herbert McAvoy
enact a ‘vacating’ of, or exile from, coherent language and linear temporality,
taking us in and out of different time conceptualizations, alternating between
the place of illness, the space of pain and otherness of vision, to the location
of their perpetual re-membering and, ultimately, into the form of the ‘not
yet performed’ text itself.
Such a movement in and out of different temporalities and between secular
and sacred spaces is also delineated in the text by Julian’s concerted use of
specific dates, time periods and temporal adverbial markers – or their almost
complete absence, depending upon which time and space she is wishing
to conceptualize. Her treatment of her worldly sickroom experiences, for
example, is characterized by a temporal specificity wholly omitted in the
context of her visionary narratives. For instance, the date of the visions’ onset
is specified (‘the yer of our lord 1373, the thirteenth day of May’),36 and Julian
is equally as specific about her age at that time (‘when I was thirty yere old
and a halfe’).37 She also specifies that her illness raged for ‘three days and
three nightes’, after which ‘on the fourth night I toke all my rightes of holy
church and wened not to have liven till day’. Following this, she specifies,
‘I langourid forth two days and two nights, and on the third night I wened
oftentimes to have passed’.38 Such specificity not only carries the reader back
into the same temporal and spatial frame of Julian’s 1373 illness, but also traps
her there with Julian. In this way, the description continues, unfolding inexo-
rably with the repeated use of adverbial markers such as ‘then’, ‘and then’,
‘after this’, ‘then cam’, which serve to place and order events within a recog-
nizable temporal linearity. When illness cedes to vision, however, the orderly
and inexorable rhythms of time are instantly disrupted by Julian’s use of an
abrupt transition, characterized by the word ‘sodenly’ and its repetition (‘And
in this, sodenly I saw the red blood’; ‘And in the same shewing, sodeinly the
trinity fulfilled my hart’) in the place of the markers of temporal progres-
sion and linearity.39 Julian has been transported out of worldly time and
space into a new dimension in which linear time as a means of organizing
space – and herself as ‘space’ – is meaningless. She recognizes another form
of espacement which does not progress phallicly, as such, but is, in Irigarayan
terms, ‘the living edges of flesh opening’;40 that is to say, dependent upon the
morphology of an open female body for its articulation, rather than a sealed
‘vessel’. Hence, her use of phrases of contemporaneity, rather than linearity,
such as ‘in this’, ‘in the same shewing’; ‘[i]n this same time’, leap to promi-
nence, along with a simple, unmodified use of the past tense: ‘I saw’; ‘he
shewed’; ‘I wened’, etc. This contrast holds true throughout her text, making
36 Revelation 2. 2, p. 125.
37 Revelation 3. 1, p. 129.
38 Revelation 3. 2–5, pp. 129–31.
39 Revelation 4. 1; 6, p. 135.
40 Luce Irigaray, Parler n’est jamais neutre (Paris, 1985), p. 301.
104
itself particularly felt in Chapter 66 when Julian describes her re-emergence
into the sickroom from her visionary universe, only to be tormented by an
apparition of the fiend during the night. Here, she flags her movement back
into worldly temporality and space by her textual return to a concerted use
of temporal markers within which the ‘open’ female body is a threat – and
under threat – rather than being a threshold to the transcendent. Beginning
the chapter with ‘Ande after this’, what follows can be read startlingly in terms
of Irigaray’s conceptualization of time as a phallic and masculine shaper and
appropriator of ‘feminine’ space. Julian’s carefully depicted description of the
fiend’s haunting is characterized by a proliferation of those temporal markers
that have been almost entirely absent in her visionary narrative: ‘on the night
folowing’; ‘furst’; ‘at the ende’; ‘soone’; ‘anone’; ‘as it was before’; ‘then’; ‘and
when’. The result is a similar ‘fixing’ by phallic time as we saw in the case of
the early sickroom narrative, spurring Julian on to exclaim ultimately, ‘This
place is prison, this life is penance’.41
For Julian, the remedy for this fixedness is the knowledge received by the
open female body operating outside of phallic time. This knowledge tells of
the eternal – and mystical – presence of a God who, like a mother, envelops
us in ‘endlesse joy […], in tru love and seker trust’.42 Such knowledge there-
fore transforms the past-present-future of phallic consciousness into a true
heterotopia where a female espacement, based on the more cyclical – and
concurrent – rhythms of maternity and natality, can speak just as well for
the universal – and to everybody: her evencristen.
As suggested, Julian’s heterotopic spaces are all accessed via the conduit
of her body, which, in her opening chapters, she grounds almost hyperboli-
cally in the here-and-now by saturating it with statements of female desire.
In fact, the words ‘I desirede’ constitute the first words of the text, and the
first chapter alone proceeds to deploy the term and its cognates another
eleven times, interspersed liberally with other articulations of desire, such
as ‘I might’; ‘I wolde’; ‘I hoped’. Such desire not only forms Julian’s primary
identity at the start of her narrative, but also provides a ‘portal’ for Julian
to become what Irigaray has termed, in her essay on the potential of female
mysticism to provide both female subjectivity and female espacement, a site
of ‘expectant expectancy’.43 In effect, this is another ‘threshold’, freighted with
the possibility for a desiring female body to access the ‘other’ in terms of its
own espacement and transcendence. As Irigaray states elsewhere: ‘[Female]
Desire demands […] a displacement of the subject or of the object in their
relations of nearness or distance.’44 Hence, Julian’s union with Christ (and,
41 Revelation 77. 33, p. 365.

42 Revelation 77. 34–7, p. 365.
43 Luce Irigaray, ‘La Mystérique’, in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill
(Ithaca, NY, 1985), pp. 191–202 (p. 194).
105
Liz Herbert McAvoy
by implication, that of her ‘evencristen’), as understood from her visions, is
characterized by a mutual indwelling, articulated in terms of the subjective
‘displacement’ of perpetual pregnancy, in which a maternal God’s ‘blessed
children which be come out of him by kind shall be brougt againe into him
by grace’.45 For Julian, therefore, the ordering of humanity by God ‘our fader’
is subsumed within the open-bodied dynamics and mutual indwelling that
is God ‘our moder’, creating a mode within which both female espacement
and female transcendence can be realized.
Julian of Norwich is not the only visionary female author to deploy such
a technique for accessing a female espacement, however. A second ancho-
ritic text, written in English and roughly contemporary with Julian’s own,
is A Revelation of Purgatory, a work which, whilst lacking the layered,
poetic sophistication of Julian’s writing, is important for its testifying to the
visionary experiences of another fifteenth-century female anchorite, this
time in late-medieval Winchester.46 Although remaining resolutely anony-
mous in her text, this writer has recently been identified by Mary C. Erler
as the same woman who, the records reveal, was consulted twice on personal
matters by Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick in 1421, on one occasion
leaving her anchorhold for London in order to proffer advice to him.47 She
is clearly a woman with some visionary experience and influence,48 and her
text records how, in the summer of 1422, she was visited in a dream by her
dead friend Margaret, speaking to her from Purgatory over the course of
three nights. Margaret had evidently been a nun, probably from the nearby
nunnery of Nunnaminster,49 whose religious life had been less than exem-
plary and who was now paying the cost in her transition through purgato-
rial torment. Along with a host of other tormented souls, amongst whom
sinful religious figures predominate, Margaret both displays and details the
torments experienced by these suffering souls as they too reap the rewards
of moral laxity on earth. Indeed, the acerbic critique of religious hypocrisy
with which the text is imbued, and the circle of named influential churchmen
who form its first audience, suggest that it was written – or at least used – as
part of a Lancastrian reformist agenda that led from the visionary (‘a deuout
45 Revelation 63. 43–4, p. 321.

46 A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary:
Introduction, Critical Text and Translation, ed. Marta Powell Harley, Studies in Women
and Religion 18, (Lewiston, 1985). All references will be to this edition and citations
will be to line number and page.
47 On this, see Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England
(Berkeley, CA, 1985), pp. 77–8; Mary C. Erler, ‘“A Revelation of Purgatory” (1422):
Reform and the Politics of Female Visions’, Viator 38.1 (2007), 321–83, at 325.
48 For example, she implies that she has had a spiritual guide on previous occasions and
has witnessed purgatorial suffering before (lines 13–15 and lines 21–2, p. 59).
49 Erler, ‘Revelation’, p. 323.
106
woman solitary’)50 through to, in Erler’s words, ‘a level within the Lancastrian
dynasty just below the royal’.51
In this text, as in Julian’s, we find a carefully devised, although somewhat
differently deployed, configuration of temporal markers and delineations of
visionary and non-visionary spaces. For example, the text moves in and out
of anchoritic and visionary space at intervals, with the transitions echoing
Julian’s own in the use of adverbs such as ‘sodeynly’ or adverbial phrases
such as ‘as fast’ and ‘sone aftyr’.52 Like Julian, too, the author makes it clear
that the visionary realm and the anchoritic space are one and the same,
albeit configured by different time dimensions at any given moment. Here,
the anchoritic woman is both the envelope for and of herself, as well as a
patriarchically accredited one; she is also the threshold across which can
be glimpsed the redemptive otherworld, firstly by and through herself and
then by the circle of churchmen via her written text. This heterotopic multi-
plicity is accomplished not only by the fact that she is inevitably freighted by
the type of anchoritic discourse evidenced by Aelred and the Ancrene Wisse
author discussed above, but also by the fact that the visions are all incurred
whilst she is asleep within an enclosed and private space and, again like
Julian, given expression to via an inert body. Like Julian, too, she animates
her worldly space (and its liturgical temporality) for the reader upon her
periodic ‘return’ to it, telling, for example, how, having woken in fear, she
and her ‘lytel mayd child’ rise from bed to recite ‘vij psallmes and þe lytany’,
and how she is unable to complete the task because of her sleepiness.53
Although she is asleep during these visionary experiences, the text also
makes it clear that the visions unfold before a fixed female ‘gaze’, with the
first-person perspective ‘I sawe’ repeated emphatically at every juncture.
Unlike the male gaze, which tends to define and classify (in Irigaray’s terms
‘creates his identity with her as his starting point’),54 the relentlessly subjective
self-assertion of the author here is modified by an equally insistent use of
the term ‘me thoȝt’ (and, occasionally, ‘it semed’) as lenses through which to
present what she thought she was ‘seeing’ during her visionary encounters.55
50 This identification appears in the list of contents of a manuscript housing the earliest
account of these visions, Dorchester, Longleat House MS 29, fol. 2.
51 Erler, ‘Revelation’, p. 331.
52 See, for example, line 13, p. 59; line 57, p. 60; line 227, p. 65.
53 Revelation of Purgatory, lines 51–2, p. 60.
55 For a discussion of the use of these terms in medieval mystical writings, see I.
Taavitsainen, ‘Genre/Subgenre Styles in Late Middle English’, in Early English in the
Computer Age: Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus, ed. M. Rissanen, M. Kytö and
M. Palander-Collin (Berlin, 1993), pp. 171–200. For a discussion of this specifically in
the context of Julian of Norwich, see Fumiko Yoshikawa, ‘Julian of Norwich and the
Rhetoric of the Impersonal’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within
the Discourses of Enclosure, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff, 2008), pp. 141–54.
107
Liz Herbert McAvoy
Whilst no doubt a necessary linguistic screen within a climate in which reli-
gious heterodoxy was subject to intense persecution,56 this modification of
the gaze’s ‘ownership’ of what it beholds, and its emanation from a deeply
private and internal space, serves to create a dialogic between the visionary
and her audience, between commentary and critique, heterodoxy and ortho-
doxy, and to imbricate the text with a topos of authorial ‘uncertainty’ so
characteristic of female-authored visionary texts of the period.57 Clearly, too,
this ‘uncertainty’ is in part a ploy or textual performance. Upon Margaret’s
express instruction, on the morning following the first night of visionary
activity the author takes news of what she has seen to a range of named
churchmen, requiring them to say a specific number of prayers and masses
for Margaret’s soul. These, we are told, they readily undertake and, in so
doing, they enter into the service of the two women, both of whom have been
operating in liminal ‘threshold’ locations beyond the grave – the one in the
anchorhold, the other in purgatory. Thus, female visionary space is used to
order male action and liturgical time, in a reversal of the type of espacement
normally encountered within worldly temporality. In the words of Margaret
to the sleeping visionary:
And þerfor what man or woman þat is of power, mak þay þese holy messes to
be seid for ham [the dead], and if þay wer in þe grettest peyne of purgatory,
he shold sone be delyuered of ham and of al oþer.58
As a ‘woman þat is of power’ the visionary’s intervention will ultimately

restructure masculine liturgical time in order to bring about Margaret’s
release from purgatory.
As we might expect in a text dealing with the doctrine of purgatory,
however, linear temporality looms large in its early stages. Like Julian, for
example, the author is almost pedantically precise in her locating of her
experiences within a specific time and place: the date is St Lawrence’s feast-
day in 1422; the events begin to unfold after she goes to sleep ‘at nyȝt […]
at viij of the clock’; the vision itself takes place ‘betwix ix and x’ when
‘me thought I was rauyshed into purgatory’.59 Immediately, however, she is
transported to a space within which language ceases to function effectively:
56 For a discussion of the ‘highly politically charged’ use of Middle English in the writing
of the period, see Nicholas Watson, ‘The Politics of Middle English Writing’, in The
Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280–1520, ed.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans (Exeter,
1999), pp. 331–52 (p. 331).
57 For a discussion of this in the context of Julian of Norwich, again see Nicholas Watson,
‘“Yf women be double naturally”: Remaking “Woman” in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation
of Love’, Exemplaria 8, 1 (1996), 1–34.
108
its smell is indescribable (‘al þe creatures in the world myȝt noȝt telle þe
wikked smylynge þerof ’) and the tortures being inflicted upon Margaret also
lie beyond immediate linguistic response (‘I myȝt noȝt discreue ham at þat
tyme’).60 Moreover, in keeping with contemporary belief, Margaret confirms
that ‘“a day of sekeness her [in the world] and tribulacion shal stand for
a ȝer in purgatory”’.61 This is a realm within which both worldly time and
language begin to break down, although this breakdown is largely discursive:
the visionary does manage to describe purgatory’s excesses; Margaret does
demonstrate the extent of her own suffering; they do manage to have several
extended and meaningful conversations; time does, indeed, appear to pass,
both on earth and within a purgatorial context. Nevertheless, within this text,
the disruption of language and time as it is known on earth, when refracted
through a specifically female gaze – and within another heterotopic space –
clearly constitutes the visionary’s primary strategy of agency: by the end of
the account, Margaret’s suffering has come to an end and she is delivered
into the hands of a decidedly maternal Virgin:
Þat fayr lady [the Virgin] toke a white cloth and wrapped al about hyr
[Margaret] and said to hyr ‘Come on, doghtyr, with me, and þou shalte receyue
the oil of mercy, and þy conscience shal be made clene.’62
Until this moment, Margaret’s release has been – most literally – in the
balance, with the devil and the Virgin vying for her soul as she sits in the
purgatorial scales, weighed against the perfidious ‘worme of conscience’.63
Nor is it the prayers and masses undertaken for her by the circle of powerful
churchmen that make the ultimate difference; Margaret is finally redeemed
because of a recent pilgrimage, undertaken on her behalf by the visionary
author herself, to the Virgin’s shrine at nearby Southwick, since Margaret
had died before she could fulfil her own vow to do so (‘“sho made a vow to
pilgrimage and fulfilled it noȝt”’).64 Indeed, acknowledging this pilgrimage
of redemption undertaken by the visionary on behalf of her friend, the ‘fayr
lady’, directly implicates her in the salvific process:
And þan me þoȝt þat fayr lady seid, ‘Her is one þat hath done hit for hyr, and
my son and I haue geven þis woman mercy. And fy on þe, Sathanasse! þou
and þe worme of conscience shal neuer der hyr more’.65
Here, both the visionary and Mary unite as harrowers of Hell, between them
60 Revelation of Purgatory, lines 29–30, p. 59; line 47, p. 60.

61 Revelation of Purgatory, line 726, p. 81.
63 Revelation of Purgatory, line 851, p. 84.
64 Revelation of Purgatory, lines 850–9, pp. 84–5.
65 Revelation of Purgatory, lines 850–9, pp. 84–5.
109
Liz Herbert McAvoy
sending Satan and the worm back to their own diabolical location. This effects
a conflation between the visionary and the Virgin that has been developing
throughout the entire text via Margaret’s repeated cry, ‘O, der lady, be my
help,’66 a plea that reverberates three times. It ultimately becomes unclear,
however, to which ‘lady’ (whether anchorite or Virgin) Margaret is appealing.
This uncertainty has the effect of collapsing anchorite into Virgin Mother,
the bodily into the spiritual, bringing to mind as it does so the rhetorical
questioning of the Ancrene Wisse author to his audience: ‘Vre leoue Leafdi,
ne leaded ha anlich lif? Ne fond te engel hire in anli stude al ane? Nes ha
nohwer ute, ah wes biloken feste’ (‘Didn’t our blessed Lady lead a solitary life?
Didn’t the angel find her alone in solitude? She was not anywhere outside,
but was strictly enclosed’).67 The masculine rhetoric of the female anchoritic
life articulated here, then, allows for a full conflation between the Virgin
and the recluse which, in the hands of the woman author herself, ultimately
provides a heterotopic espacement in which women do, indeed, gain access
to the transcendent and are able to impose an alternative spatial dynamic
back onto worldly temporality. Whilst this author is not a mystic in the tradi-
tional sense, she is a visionary writer who recognizes the potential within
visionary activity for a female-focused redemptive pathway. Indeed, Christ
plays only a bit-part role in her particular version of the redemptive drama:
he is addressed by the Virgin as ‘Sone’ and is subject entirely to her agenda
and discourse (‘“Sone […] take þis womman and let hyr be weyet”’; “‘my
sone and I haue geven þis womman mercy”’; ‘þe fayr lady offred Margarete to
hym [Christ]’).68 Moreover, Christ’s obedience to his mother’s will is directly
mirrored by the prayers of remission effected by the Winchester churchmen
on the express bidding of the visionary.
Thus, rather than being configured in terms of phallic time and space,
as was the case for Aelred’s sister, the Ancrene Wisse women and Woolf ’s
Mrs Ramsay, the writing of Julian of Norwich and the Winchester visionary
recall and re-member an experience in which women’s bodies enter the main
frame, not as simple dwelling-places for men and their discourse, but as
productive of an alternative espacement without beginning, middle or end,
within which the woman envisioner can both re-member and dwell. As such,
these writers identify a discursive realm that ultimately escapes the Irigarayan
‘master–slave dialectic’ of traditional espacement, producing ‘ceaselessly […]
something in motion and un-limited which disturbs the perspective of his
world, and his/its limits’.69
66 For this and other similar demands, see Revelation of Purgatory, lines 64, 86, and 91–2,
p. 61; lines 225–6, p. 65.
68 Revelation of Purgatory, lines 66, 86 and 91–2, p. 61; lines 225–6, p. 65.
110
7
Gendered Discourses of Time and Memory in

the Cult and Hagiography of William
of Norwich
Anne E. Bailey
Ad exequendum igitur tante et tam execrande malitie conspirantes flagitium

mox innocentem uictimam manibus cruentis arripiunt et a terra sublatum
patibuloque applicatum pari uoto certatim extinguere contendunt. Et nos rem
diligentius inquirentes et domum inuenimus et rei geste signa certissima in ipsa
deprehendimus et manifesta. Erat autem, ut fama traditur, pro patibulo postis
inter postes duos medius lignaque ad ipsos a medio in dexteram et utrobique
porrecta. Et sicut per uulnerum et uinculorum uestigia postmodum reuera
deprehendimus, a dextris dextera et pes dexter uinculis strictissime coartantur;
a sinistris uero leua nec non et pes leuus gemino clauo affigitur. Hec autem ex
industria sic agebantur ne scilicet quandoque inuentus deprehensis in eo hinc
et inde clauorum fixuris, a iudeis non a christianis deprehenderetur utique
fuisse occisus.
(Conspiring to accomplish the crime of this great and detestable malice, they
[the Jews] next laid their blood-stained hands upon the innocent victim, and
having lifted him from the ground and fastened him upon the cross, they
vied with one another in their efforts to make an end of him. And we, after
enquiring into the matter very diligently, did both find the house, and discov-
ered some most certain marks in it of what had been done there. For report
goes that there was there instead of a cross, a post set up between two other
posts, and a beam stretched across the midmost post and attached to the other
on either side. And as we afterwards discovered, from the marks of the wounds
and of the hands, the right hand and foot had been tightly bound and fastened
with cords, but the left hand and foot were pierced with two nails: so in fact the
deed was done by design that, in case at any time he should be found, when
the fastenings of the nails were discovered it might not be supposed that he
had been killed by Jews rather than by Christians).1
1 Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, ed. and trans.
A. Jessop and M. R. James (Cambridge, 1896) [hereafter, Life and Miracles], pp. 21–2.
111
Anne E. Bailey
During the Easter of 1144, the body of a twelve-year-old apprentice leather-
worker was discovered in a wood on the outskirts of Norwich. Although
the mystery of William’s murder was never officially resolved, his death was
blamed, by some, on the Jews. On the strength of this allegation, William’s
corpse was appropriated by the cathedral priory at Norwich and, six years
later, as memories of the boy’s death were fading away, the story was written
up by a Norwich monk – Thomas of Monmouth – in the form of a hagi-
ographical account. The Vita et Passione Sancti Willelmi Martyris Norwicensis
(now known as the Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, thanks to
its nineteenth-century editors, Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes
James) played an important role in one of the most remarkable saint-making
episodes in medieval England.2
The text of the Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich is extant in one
manuscript (Cambridge University Library, Additional MS 3037), dated to
just before 1200 by Jessop and James.3 Written in Latin, the Life and Miracles
comprises seven books arranged chronologically to chart the events associ-
ated with the early development of the Norwich cult from William’s birth in
1132 to the last recorded miracle in 1172. The first book describes the saint’s
life (‘vita’), his death (‘passio’), the discovery of his body (‘inventio’) and his
first translation (‘translatio’). Book Two diverts from hagiographical conven-
tion in providing a passionate defence of the cult by setting out the ‘truth’
(‘veritas’) of William’s martyrdom in the form of evidence and witness state-
ments. Establishing William’s eligibility for sainthood was particularly impor-
tant, since Norwich’s monks and citizens were evidently not easily persuaded
that the boy had been murdered by the Jews: the event upon which Thomas’s
claim for William’s sanctity depended.4 Having refuted the main objections
of the cult’s detractors, books Three to Seven take up the story from 1150,
recounting William’s posthumous miracles (‘miracula’).
William of Norwich is perhaps best known today as the first victim of
the medieval conspiracy theory known as ‘blood libel’, in which the Jewish
community was said to organize a yearly sacrifice of a Christian child.5
Leaving aside the ritual murder accusation, one of the most extraordinary
aspects of Norwich’s child-martyr cult is the provenance of its subject. The
establishment of a new relic cult in this period was usually dependent on the
2 For William’s cult, see Simon Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in
Twelfth-Century England (Oxford, 2006), pp. 122–67 and M. D. Anderson, A Saint at
Stake: The Strange Death of William of Norwich, 1144 (London, 1964).
3 The original composition, however, is dated to 1172–73. ‘Introduction’, Life and Miracles,
p. liii.
4 For further details, see Yarrow, Saints, pp. 127–40.
5 For the Jews of Norwich and the blood libel myth see John McCulloh, ‘Jewish Ritual
Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth and the Early Dissemination
of the Myth’, Speculum 72.3 (1997), 698–740; Jeffrey J. Cohen, ‘The Flow of Blood in
Medieval Norwich’, Speculum 79 (2004), 26–65.
112
The Cult and Hagiography of William of Norwich
known and proven sanctity of the individual in question, and it was far from
normal for the corpses of ordinary boys to be appropriated by monasteries
and turned into saints.6
In this respect, it is hardly surprising that the Life and Miracles suggests
that William’s hagiographer, Thomas of Monmouth, faced a significant
challenge in his campaign to convince the citizens of Norwich that such a
‘puerulus pauperculus pannosus’ (‘poor, ragged little boy’), ‘nullis preceden-
tibus meritis’ (‘with no previous merits’) was worthy of veneration.7 Indeed,
Thomas reveals that the early miracles were treated with scepticism, and that
the part played by the Jews in his murder was far from a universal belief.
Moreover, interest in William seems to have died away well before the time
when Thomas seriously began to promote the cult. Thomas himself admits
that the memory of the boy had to be revived, ‘que paulatim decrescens, in
cordibus universorum fere funditus iam fuerat emortua’ (‘For [the memory]
was gradually waning; now in the hearts of almost everyone it had nearly
died out’).8 Thomas’s struggle to recapture the hearts and minds of Norwich’s
citizens on behalf of the murdered boy is recorded in and, to some extent,
embodied by the hagiographical text.
In order to make the claim for sainthood convincing, Thomas – like all
hagiographers – had to present his protagonist both as a credible human
being and also as a pious exemplar conforming to saintly convention.9 This
would have been less of a problem for writers championing the sanctity of
long-dead saints, where the boundary between fact and fiction, or history
and hagiography, could be blurred with relative impunity. However, in a situ-
ation where many witnesses were still alive, the writing of hagiography was
an entirely different matter. This was especially pertinent in William’s case,
because many witnesses also had a vested interest in the cult: one of the boy’s
uncles, for example, profited by loaning out a contact relic for a fee, while
another became a monk at the priory.10
Perhaps for this reason, we are presented with two very different Williams
in Thomas’s account: a William who convinces readers of his historical reality
in his everyday ordinariness, and yet one who also conforms to more extraor-
dinary standards of sainthood. Thus, on the one hand, William is represented
as an ordinary, unprepossessing little boy who leaves his parents’ home in
6 However, other similar accusations were to follow in England, northern France and
Germany. See, for example, Gavin I. Langmuir, ‘At the Frontiers of Faith’, in Religious
Violence between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. Anna
Sapir Abulafia (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 150–1.
7 Life and Miracles, p. 85.
9 For the writing of hagiography and its literary conventions, see Thomas J. Heffernan,
Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographies in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988).
10 Life and Miracles, pp. 192–3; Yarrow, Saints, pp. 147–8.
113
Anne E. Bailey
the country for an apprenticeship in the city, where he subsequently meets
an untimely, brutal demise. In both life and death this William is surrounded
by members of a loving family – mother, brother, uncle and cousins – who
provide a touching human element.
On the other hand, William is also a saintly prodigy whose short life-story
must, to some extent, follow hagiographical precedent. Thus we discover that
William’s birth is foretold in a vision and that, by the age of seven, he is
engaged in some very untypical childhood habits. These include giving his
food away to the poor, choosing to live on bread and water, never annoying
his parents and zealously learning his psalms.11 In this idealized version, it
is William’s destiny to become a sacrificial victim of Jewish hatred, and his
death in the narrative is modelled on the betrayal, crucifixion and resur-
rection of Christ. The Easter date of William’s murder is, of course, crucial
in this respect. Not only does it set up William as a Christ-martyr, it also
gives credibility to the claim of Jewish ritual murder. Thomas makes much
of the fact that William was nailed and strung up to a makeshift cross in the
manner of a mock execution.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore these two versions of William’s
story through the anthropology of gendered time and memory. Drawing
on the nature/culture model of gender difference as developed and revised
by Sherry Ortner and Caroline Walker Bynum,12 it argues that stories and
memories – and especially stories and memories of the dead – are construed
differently by men and women. That is to say, men conceive death as a deci-
sive break. Time stops, and then starts again anew. Women, however, use
memory to span the gulf between life and death, enabling human relation-
ships to continue beyond the grave.
What follows suggests that this feminist nuancing of the nature/culture
dichotomy offers some important insights into the cult and hagiography of
William of Norwich. In particular, the chapter demonstrates how such an
approach uncovers two surprising aspects of William’s cult: first, traces of
a ‘feminine’ discourse of time and memory like those uncovered by Harris-
Stoertz in her essay on the Inquisitions Post Mortem earlier in this volume, can
be discerned beneath the official ‘masculine’ hagiographical record of events
surrounding William’s death; second, that Thomas of Monmouth exploited
this feminine discourse as a narrative device to smooth over the troublesome
11 Life and Miracles, pp. 13–14.

12 Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in Woman, Culture
and Society, ed. M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (Stanford, CA, 1974), pp. 67–87;
Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Men’s Use of Female Symbols’, in Debating the Middle Ages:
Issues and Readings, ed. L. K. Little and B. H. Rosenwein (Oxford, 1998), pp. 277–89,
and ‘Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of
Liminality’, in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body
in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), pp. 27–51.
114
transition between ordinary and holy, that is, William the apprentice leather-
worker and William the saintly miracle-worker.
The anthropological nature/culture model is often imagined in terms of
gender difference, where men are identified with culture and women are
equated with nature. However, this either/or model has been challenged by
feminist scholars over the last half century or so, with poststructural adapta-
tions seeking to collapse the rigid binary division between nature and culture.
Sherry Ortner’s 1974 essay, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’,
is perhaps one of the most influential of these revisions. In searching for
explanations for the ‘universality of female subordination’, Ortner proposes
that the nature/culture dichotomy is a male construct: in wishing to exclude
women from the cultural realm, men found it expedient to divide the world
into oppositional camps.13 Ortner argues against this masculine worldview,
contending that women ‘cannot be fully consigned to nature’ because, in
reality, they belonged to both realms.14
Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous raw/cooked analogy, Ortner
explains how women’s domestic and childcare roles meant that women
collectively represented ‘a powerful agent of the cultural process, constantly
transforming raw natural resources into cultural products’.15 With particular
reference to the socializing of children, Ortner explains that ‘[the woman]
transformed infants into cultured humans, teaching them [how] to become
fully-fledged members of the culture’.16 Not just occupying a ‘middle position’
between nature and culture, women were ‘a mediating element in the culture-
nature relationship’, and performed a ‘synthesising or converting function
between nature and culture’.17
These ideas were further developed by medievalists from the 1980s on,18
and we can also see them idealized in Thomas of Monmouth’s text – espe-
cially in terms of the mother–child relationship highlighted by Ortner. Thus
it is William’s mother, rather than his father, who is present as a guiding
and protective figure during socially and religiously significant transitional
events in the Life and Miracles, and his mother who ‘diligenter educando
13 The quotation is from Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male’, p. 69 and passim.

14 Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male’, pp. 79 and 80.
15 Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male’ p. 80.
16 Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male’, pp. 79–80.
17 Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male’, pp. 86–7 and p. 84.
18 For example, Sharon Farmer, ‘Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives’,
Speculum 61 (1986), 517–43; Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church
(Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 73, 154–228; Matthew Innes, ‘Keeping it in the Family: Women
and Aristocratic Memory, 700–1200’, in Medieval Memories: Men, Women and the Past
700–1300, ed. Elisabeth van Houts (Harlow, 2001), pp. 17–35.
115
Anne E. Bailey
ab infantia ad intelligibiles pueritie annos perduxit’ (‘by carefully educating
[him] brought him up from infancy to the years of intelligent boyhood’).19
In the 1990s, the feminist nature–culture model took a cultural turn when
Caroline Walker Bynum drew on Ortner’s ideas to argue that women in
medieval Europe conceptualized their worlds differently from men.20 With
reference to medieval constructions of male and female spirituality she
suggested that whereas men’s ‘stories’ were imagined in terms of a series
of abrupt changes or reversals, women framed their experiences as a seam-
less continuum. Bynum agreed with Ortner that men naturally gravitated
towards ‘masculine’ symbols of opposition. What neither Ortner nor Bynum
discuss, however, is the possibility that, in certain contexts, men knowingly
adopted what Bynum refers to as ‘women’s symbols of continuity’. Again,
this narrative scenario is something that Harris-Stoertz argues for in her
essay, and is one which, I shall suggest, can also be detected in William of
Norwich’s hagiography.
First, though, we must probe the feminist nature–culture model a little
further, and contextualize ‘symbols of continuity’ in relationship to memories
of the dead. Anthropologists studying death rituals in Greek society from
classical to modern times highlight the fact that women regarded the death
of a loved one not as an abrupt break, but rather as a transition from one
state to another. This female cultural response might be symbolized by rituals
of lamentation: Anna Caraveli-Chaves, for example, has described the female
lamenter as a ‘mediator between realms’, opening up ‘channels of communi-
cation between the living and the dead’.21 Other scholars have drawn atten-
tion to the continuation of women’s association with the dead after burial in
different cultures, even going so far as to describe grave-management as a
‘household’ duty, with burial places being perceived by women as a continu-
ation of their domestic world.22
These ethnographical observations suggest that women’s reaction to death
was often different from that of men, with ‘symbols of continuity’ informing
women’s memorial behaviour. In another example, Maurice Bloch famously
describes the phenomenon of the ‘double funeral’ in gendered terms. In a
study focusing on the Merina of Madagascar, he explains that the initial
funeral rite, immediately after death, is associated with women and the
home, and is made manifest by female expressions of sorrow and disorder.

20 Bynum, ‘Female Symbols’, pp. 277–89, and ‘Women’s Stories’, pp. 27–51.
21 Anna Caraveli-Chaves, ‘Bridge Between Two Worlds: The Greek Lament as
Communicative Event’, Journal of American Folklore 93 (1980), 129–57.
22 For example, Renée Hirschon, ‘Women, the Aged and Religious Activity: Oppositions
and Complementarity in an Urban Locality’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 1 (1983),
113–29 (118–20); E. Ardener, ‘Belief and the Problem with Women’, in Perceiving
Women, ed. S. Ardener (London, 1975), pp. 1–17.
116
The second rite, held after the corpse has decomposed or dried out, is under-
taken by men and involves the re-location of the dead to the public realm.
Although Bloch interprets this as a cultural victory over natural biology,
he also emphasizes that women perform an important mediating role in
accompanying the corpse on its journey to the public realm. As in Ortner’s
nature–culture model, women are shown by Bloch to be instrumental agents
of transition, effectively expanding time instead of curtailing it.23
Double burials are relevant to my argument, as they were practised in
Jerusalem at the time of Christ, and seem to have echoed as a motif down
into Middle Ages, where, I shall argue, they influenced underlying assump-
tions about saints’ cults.24 The Jewish double burial initially involved depos-
iting the body in a family tomb, and was followed by a second rite known
as ossilegium, in which the bones were transferred to a more honoured place,
often under an altar.25 After his crucifixion, Christ seems to have been laid in
a family tomb of this type, and the Gospels hint at a double burial motif, with
the resurrection representing the mystical removal of the body to a ‘better’
place. As is common in double burials, women in the Gospels play a medi-
ating role. In witnessing and proclaiming the truth of the resurrection, the
women at the tomb symbolically transform ‘nature’ into ‘culture’ – a theme
made much of by Thomas of Monmouth’s contemporary, Peter Abelard.26 In
other words, it could be argued that the female conversionary role – which
Ortner identified in her nature–culture model – lies at the very heart of
Christian theology, and it will be argued that Thomas of Monmouth used
the same motif as a way of legitimizing William’s sanctity.
Female ‘symbols of continuity’, then, have been usefully employed by
modern and medieval writers alike for the purpose of highlighting the
agency of women in male-dominated societies. The remainder of this chapter
argues that Thomas of Monmouth adopted a remarkably similar cultural
model as a hagiographical strategy, and reveals how and why the Life and
Miracles of William of Norwich is governed by a distinctly feminine discourse
of continuity.
Approaching Thomas’s Life and Miracles from this gendered perspec-
tive necessitates reading the cult of saints as a cultural discourse predicated
23 Maurice Bloch, ‘Death, Women and Power’, in Death and the Regeneration of Life, ed.
Maurice Bloch and J. Parry (London, 1982), pp. 211–30. The classic study for double
burial is Robert Hertz, ‘A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation
of Death’, in Death and the Right Hand, ed. Robert Hertz, trans. Rodney and Claudia
Needham (London, 2004), pp. 27–86.
24 For Jewish double burials see E. M. Meyers, Jewish Ossuaries: Reburial and Rebirth:
Secondary Burials in the Ancient Near Eastern Setting (Rome, 1971).
25 E. M. Meyers, ‘The Theological Implications of the Ancient Jewish Burial Custom’, The
Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 62.2 (1971), 103–4.
26 The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (London, 1975), p. 180. Revised
edition, M. T. Clanchy (London, 2003), p. 115.
117
Anne E. Bailey
upon what Bynum has defined as masculine symbols of opposition. From
this ‘masculine’ viewpoint, the medieval saint is not a natural product, but
a cultural construction conceptually removed from, if not diametrically
opposed to, biological nature. Medieval men and women, for example, were
encouraged to believe that the incorrupt holy dead were singled out from the
ordinary dead: in the case of William, the ‘incorrupt’ (‘incorruptus’) condi-
tion of the saint is underlined in the narrative by the fact that his abandoned
corpse is ‘untouched’ (‘intactus’) by the scavenging crows and other vermin
as it lies exposed in the woods.27
If there was one ritual which symbolized this ‘masculine’ switch from
‘nature’ to ‘culture’ in medieval saint devotion, it was the translatio, that is,
the ceremonial removal of a saint’s relics to a new, and usually more worthy,
location. Functioning as a ritual reminder of the mysterious process through
which ordinary dead bodies were transformed into extraordinary holy relics,
medieval translations are strikingly reminiscent of the ossilegium of Jewish
tradition mentioned above, and therefore carry echoes of Christ’s resurrec-
tion. Both the translatio and the ossilegium conceptually – as well as physi-
cally – moved human remains into the cultural, public realm.
In medieval hagiography the inventio and translatio of relics were key
ritual moments, and functioned as a useful narrative device to impress
upon readers the important fact that the protagonist really had graduated to
the ranks of the saints. Whether translations were huge public affairs with
visiting dignitaries, or secret nocturnal enterprises carried out in the pres-
ence of a handful of monks, they are presented by hagiographers as dramatic
events, their religious significance carefully underscored by miracles. From
a gendered nature/culture perspective, newly sanctified individuals entered
a thoroughly masculine world which irrevocably separated them from their
previous biological existences. Memories were created anew and time meta-
phorically stopped and started again.
Once a medieval saint was enshrined, the transition from ‘nature’ to
‘culture’ was made tangible and visible in material culture: the holy dead were
surrounded by architectural reminders that they now belonged to an artifi-
cially ordered world managed and regulated by the ecclesiastical authorities.28
For William of Norwich, the switch from mundane boyhood to celestial saint-
hood necessitated that he should be detached in time, meaning and situation
from his previous identity. As has already been noted, most twelfth-century
saints did not have to make the abrupt transition from mundane mortality
to holy immortality – and from nature to culture – in quite the same way as
was required of William of Norwich. If we are to read William’s hagiography
as a ‘masculine’ discourse of opposition, we need to acknowledge that the

28 For this theme, see Anne E. Bailey, ‘Modern and Medieval Approaches to Pilgrimage,
Gender and Sacred Space’, History and Anthropology 24.4 (2013), 497–9.
118
gap between the natural product and the cultural ideal was one that would
be exceptionally difficult to bridge.
The conceptual shift from nature to culture was paralleled, in William’s
nascent cult, by a geographical one, insofar as the body of the murdered
boy was physically moved from the realm of nature (the woods) into the
cultural milieu (the monastery). However, it is interesting that the abrupt-
ness of this transition is softened by spreading the process over a number of
years and through a series of four translations: a development which has the
result of taking the hard edge off the nature/culture dichotomy and creating
something more akin to a ‘feminine’ sense of continuing time and memory.
The first translation signals the start of William’s cult in the Life and Mira-
cles. At this point the boy’s body is taken from its original grave in Thorpe
Wood and re-buried in the monks’ cemetery. The cemetery might be thought
of as a half-way house between nature and culture:29 although set securely
within the monastic environment, William is interred in the earth, under
the skies, and his funeral is presented as an ordinary burial. Furthermore, he
is visited by a mere handful of devotees during this first stage of the cult.30
This first translation is closely followed in the text, although less closely in
historical reality, by a second move of William’s relics into the monastery’s
chapterhouse.31 It was clearly expedient to skip over the uncomfortable years
in which the cult lay dormant, and Thomas inserts at this point a passionate
defence of the cult, in answer to various criticisms.
When the text picks up the story, six years have passed and William is
being installed in a more privileged location. However, although this chap-
terhouse burial reportedly attracts more visitors, William’s relics have still not
reached the monastic church, and he is not yet considered a saint by many
of the Norwich community. It is only with the third translation, to the south
side of the altar in the priory church, that William’s status seems to be chang-
ing.32 Even so, it is not until the fourth and final translation, to the north
chancel, in an area said to be more conducive to accommodating pilgrims,
that William’s transformation is really complete.33 Thus, in terms of a hagio-
graphical nature/culture binary, the vital moment signifying William’s recog-
nition as a saint is broken down into intermediary stages across a reasonable
passage of time. Readers of the Life and Miracles are not given a simple story
of ‘opposition and reversal’, but are furnished instead with a gentler story of
29 For cemeteries as multivalent and ‘heterotopic’ spaces, see Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other
Spaces’, Diacritics 16.1 (1986), 22–7; first published as ‘Des Espaces Autres’, Architecture,
Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984), 46–9.
30 Life and Miracles, pp. 72–4, 78–9, 84.
119
Anne E. Bailey
gradual transformation. Time and memory are allowed to linger on these
pages as William is eased, bit by bit, into his new, posthumous role.
With each translation, William not only recedes more and more from
his original human identity, he also retreats little by little from his family’s
care. There is a progressive transfer of ‘ownership’ of the cult from William’s
family and neighbours to the monastic custodians. This, again, is a develop-
ment which might be interpreted as a softening of the masculine opposi-
tional model. Moreover, the role of William’s natural family in the narrative
suggests that these subtle plot developments represent something more inter-
esting than a slight nuancing of the masculine nature/culture discourse. For,
although William’s family are finally left behind in Thomas’s narrative, this
is not before they have become instrumental in transforming William into
a bona fide saint.34 Women in particular are depicted as influential agents
in William’s transformation. Thomas, I shall argue, turned to his female
protagonists – and to feminine discourses of time and memory – in order
to smooth the bumpy conceptual ride between nature and culture. In doing
so he adopted an unusual hagiographical stance: one in which symbols of
female continuity are privileged for rhetorical effect.
Women, especially, come to the fore in Thomas’s text in the events
surrounding William’s ‘passion’ and ‘resurrection’, where they appear in the
guise of biblical figures. The first example can be found in the account of
William’s betrayal. Here, Thomas narrates a convoluted and somewhat uncon-
vincing story in which the boy’s abductor tricks him by pretending to offer
him a job in the archdeacon’s kitchen. The nameless abductor takes William
to his mother, Leviva, to gain her consent, and this enables Thomas to repre-
sent Leviva as a conscience-stricken Judas: ‘hinc traditor et inde mater’ (‘On
one side was the traitor, on the other the mother’), explains Thomas.35
Leviva powerfully symbolizes the tension between nature and culture
at this point in the narrative. As biological mother, her instinct is to keep
William in his natural world, but as a culturally constructed biblical allegory,
she must also allow him to fulfil his destiny as martyr. The struggle between
nature and culture is brought out in the narrative by a ‘will-she/won’t-she’
passage in which Leviva at first refuses the abductor’s request but is finally
tempted by the three shillings proffered as a bribe. Taking the three pieces
of silver, she surrenders her son and never sees him alive again.36 In handing
William over to his enemies, Leviva metaphorically carries her son across
the troublesome nature/culture boundary, thus playing an active role in the
hagiographical ‘culturalising process’, as described by Ortner.37
34 For a slightly different interpretation of the role of William’s family, see Yarrow, Saints,
pp. 147–8.
35 Yarrow, Saints, p. 17.
36 Yarrow, Saints, pp. 17–19.
37 Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male’, p. 80.
120
So, according to the story, William is betrayed and crucified. Three days
later his body is carried from the Jews’ house and deposited in Thorpe Wood,
a few miles outside the town. The next biblical character to make a symbolic
appearance is Mary Magdalene, famed in the twelfth century as the first
witness to the resurrection (John 20.1–18). As one of the women at the tomb,
Mary Magdalene’s conversionary role in the story of Christ’s death and resur-
rection might be said to represent a female discourse of continuity, and this is
exactly her function – by proxy – in the Life and Miracles. There are, actually,
three women acting out Mary Magdalene’s gospel role in Thomas’s narrative,
perhaps alluding to the Three Marys motif, which would have been familiar
to ecclesiastics in the form of religious liturgical drama.38
The first of these women is Legarda, a holy woman, who is said to reside
at the appropriately named hospital of St Magdalene’s, on the edge of Thorpe
Wood. On discovering the corpse lying at the foot of an oak tree, she is
‘femineo correpta timore’ (‘struck with womanly fear’) and, in the manner
of Mary Magdalene, is too afraid to approach.39 The second woman to bear
witness to William’s martyrdom is the boy’s aunt. Previously forewarned
of the boy’s death in a vision, the aunt uses the authority of her vision to
announce the news and laments loudly for several days.40 The third woman
takes on Mary Magdalene’s evangelizing function by broadcasting ‘the truth’
(‘veritas’) about the boy’s death around the streets of Norwich. This last
woman is Leviva, William’s mother, now re-cast in the role of the Virgin
Mary with her maternal lament, and another echo of contemporary liturgical
drama.41 This is the first public denunciation of the Jews.
In these examples Thomas is clearly embellishing the ordinary actions of
ordinary people with extraordinary significance in order to bolster his claims
of William’s martyrdom. Using a discourse of female continuity, Thomas
meshes the homely with the biblical, and allows the conceptual realms of
nature and culture to merge. More than this, however, the three ‘Marys’ are
active agents in transporting William across the nature/culture divide, as they
collectively bear witness to William’s sanctity. They are the first characters to
declare the boy a saint and the first to publicly accuse the Jews. Significantly,
this trio of declarations forms the basis of Thomas’s claims for William’s
sanctity, because Thomas makes these female characters his mouthpiece. As
38 For extant Laments of the Three Marys, see Janthia Yearley, ‘A Bibliography of Planctus’,
Journal of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society 4 (1981), 15–27.
41 Life and Miracles, pp. 41–2. For Marian laments, see Susan Boynton, ‘From the Lament
of Rachel to the Lament of Mary: A Transformation in the History of Drama and
Spirituality’, in Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and their
Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000, ed. Nils Holger Petersen, Claus Clüver and
Nicholas Bell (Amsterdam and New York, 2004), pp. 319–40.
121
Anne E. Bailey
women, and as William’s relations or trusted members of the local commu-
nity, these conversionary figures provide a compelling, human element, and
make the hagiographical discourse – and therefore Thomas’s campaign for
William’s cult – more convincing. These female characters thus aid the diffi-
cult transition between William the boy and William the martyr, and repre-
sent a feminine form of time and memory which bridges, rather than severs,
the past and present.
I shall now turn to a group of female characters in the Life and Miracles
who at first appear to be deeply embedded in the ‘nature’ side of a mascu-
line nature/culture binary but who, I shall argue, nonetheless function as
‘symbols of continuity’, performing a ‘synthesising or converting function’ as
outlined by Ortner. The first of these is Botilda, the wife of the monks’ cook
at Norwich. Botilda is said to have had the ‘greatest … love’ (‘maximum …
amorem’) and ‘devotion’ (‘devotionis’) for William, and she enters the story
at the next major event in the development of the cult: the first transla-
tion, in which the boy’s body is removed from the shallow woodland grave
and reburied in the cathedral cemetery.42 Botilda attends the funeral, but is
described as lingering in the cemetery sometime after the other mourners
have left and taking a piece of fern (‘filix’) from the grave as a keepsake.43
Botilda’s devotion to William is shown as continuing on this personal,
‘natural’ level because, when the second translation moves William’s relics
into the monks’ chapterhouse, she is never depicted visiting the official shrine.
Instead, she seems to be drawn to William’s burial places in the natural envi-
ronment, perhaps guided by memories of William as a little boy rather than
as a culturally constructed saint. One of these burial places, as we have seen,
was the monastic cemetery. Later in the Life and Miracles, however, readers
are returned to the saint’s original grave in Thorpe Wood, and to a slightly
odd occurrence. It seems that, in response to a vision, Botilda took her sick
child to the oak under which William’s body had been discovered. Following
instructions given to her in the vision, Botilda is said to have unearthed a
hidden spring with healing properties, enabling her son to be miraculously
cured.44
Botilda is not the only woman shown venerating William at the empty
woodland grave: subsequent stories reveal that others visited the same place
for cures. It is striking that women are the only cure-seeking pilgrims depicted
in the woods. Employing the approaches of historical anthropology – which
seeks to uncover evidence for ‘popular’ religious practices and beliefs from
between the lines of ‘official’ texts – we might infer that the woodland spring
became an alternative, woman-friendly locus for William’s cult. Indeed, had a

122
feminine form of local veneration developed in the woods, this would fit well
with anthropological theories that wells, springs and the natural environment
often served as a continuation of women’s domestic world.45
Interestingly, many of the tropes found in the Botilda episode reappear in
literature pertaining to later cults which held especial attraction for women.
Examples include the cult of St Guinefort, famously reported by the Domin-
ican inquisitor, Stephen of Bourdon, in thirteenth-century France.46 Wood-
land groves, scrabbling in the earth beneath trees, hidden healing springs,
women and sick children are, it would seem, recurring motifs in some foun-
dation stories. Although these similarities point to a long-established cultural
archetype, this does not detract from the likelihood that behind them lay
very real cults initiated and practised by women in the natural landscape, as
we know, for instance, to have been the case with the more famous example
at nineteenth-century Lourdes.47
So far, then, the women visiting the Thorpe Wood grave appear to be
firmly planted in the ‘natural’ feminine world, and none more so than a
female sinner said to be prevented from approaching the Thorpe Wood site
by a mysterious, supernatural force. At this stage in William’s cult the monks
of Norwich have marked the place of the saint’s inventio and healing spring
with a chapel, and the woman in question is depicted trying to ascend the
altar steps with her offering. On each attempt, however, the pilgrim ‘Inuisibili
quadam uirtute repulsa est’ (‘is repulsed by an invisible power’).48 Finally,
exhausted, and acknowledging the futility of her exertions, the woman breaks
down in tears and issues a lament in which she bewails her unworthiness to
enter the chapel:
Qua ergo frontis irreuerentia, qua mentis audatia incesto pede et sacrilega
mente sacra contingere presumpsi loca? Et reuera digne pro meritis mihi
contigit. Sortilega, impudica et immunda, sacrati munditiam loci ingressu
indebito pollui, et culparum oblita, culparum uindicem irritaui.
(How brazen-faced, how bold, to presume with polluted foot and profane soul
to touch this holy place! Truly I am rewarded according to my deserts. A
sorceress, of impure life, I have with unlicensed foot defiled the purity of this
consecrated spot!)49
Modern commentators usually interpret the woman’s sin here as one of

sexual transgression, because Thomas of Monmouth likens the sinner
45 Hirschon, ‘Women’, 118–20; Ardener, ‘Belief ’, pp. 1–17.

46 Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the
Thirteenth Century, trans. M. Thom, rev. edn (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 2–4.
47 Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London, 1999), pp. 22, 306–9,
214, 358–9.
48 Life and Miracles, pp. 279–83, with the quotation at p. 280.
123
Anne E. Bailey
(peccatrix) to Mary of Egypt, the apocryphal penitent prostitute. However,
it may be significant that Thomas also calls her a sortilega, because this was
a term commonly used by preachers for describing countrywomen prac-
tising ancient pagan rites involving trees and idols and, indeed, it is the
word Stephen of Bourdon adopts to denounce the female devotees of Guine-
fort.50 Again reading between the lines, we might speculate that this visitor to
William’s former burial place had intended to venerate at the Thorpe Wood
shrine in a far from orthodox way: a scenario which was certainly the case
with respect to Guinefort’s cult. Here, then, is the tantalizing suggestion of an
unauthorized woodland cult not very dissimilar to that of Guinefort. It also
hints – particularly in the person of Botilida – that the memory of William’s
natural identity still lingered and was being kept alive by women in a place
far removed from the saint’s official resting place in Norwich cathedral.
Just as importantly, however, Thomas’s text also provides evidence that
this alternative cult – if ‘alternative’ cult it was – was not allowed to get out
of hand, but was regulated and policed by the monks of Norwich. As we
have seen, a chapel had been built on the site, dedicated in 1168, and the
monks had provisioned it with a ‘custodia altaris’ (‘custodian of the altar’).51
In Thomas’s narrative, all devotional activities at the woodland shrine are
not only shown as being overseen by this sharp-eyed official, but they are
also depicted as being mediated through specially appointed priests.52 In
one visionary episode, William appears in person at the chapel: not as a
little boy, but in his ‘cultural’ guise, as an alb-clad priest celebrating Mass.
Although the female protagonist of the story is allowed to communicate
with the divine in the vernacular (ironically translated back into Latin by
Thomas of Monmouth), the point is forcibly made that all religious rites in
the chapel should be directed through male authority. The Life and Miracles
emphatically stress the importance of women at the Thorpe Wood chapel
toeing the official liturgical line.
Perhaps the most powerful story of female religious conformity in Thorpe
Wood is that of the sortilega mentioned above, whose undisclosed sins
prevented her from literally crossing this official line. It is interesting that,
as in the previous example, Thomas makes this woman into a pious exem-
plar. Having confessed her sins and shown herself to be suitably penitent,
the woman is finally allowed to approach the altar. ‘[R]epulsam non sentiens’
(‘Experiencing no repulse’), she symbolically moves across the threshold –
out of the woods and into the chapel – under the scrutiny and approval of
the priest.53 The transition from nature to culture is visibly re-affirmed.
The Thorpe Wood miracles, then, suggest that remembrance of William
50 Schmitt, Holy Greyhound, pp. 2, 17, 18–27.

52 Life and Miracles, pp. 282 and 286.
124
was appropriated, modified and controlled by the Norwich monks: a distinct
case of culture riding roughshod over nature, we might suppose, and an
example of a masculine discourse of opposition in which male and female
forms of time and memory clash. However, a slightly different perspective
might be gained with reference to Ortner’s nature–culture model. In person-
ally converting from unofficial to official forms of cultic practice, we might
also argue that these women visiting William’s woodland burial place play a
pivotal ‘culturalising’ role in the text, and not least in encouraging contem-
porary audiences to perform approved forms of Christian ritual in relation
to William’s cult. As with Legarda, William’s aunt and Botilda, the Thorpe
Wood women function in the text as agents of change. More importantly,
they ease William between the realms of life and afterlife in a hagiographi-
cally acceptable way.
St William of Norwich was a cultural construct divorced, to a large degree,
from his original human individuality. The Norwich monks who appro-
priated William’s body in 1144 also appropriated and institutionalized his
remembrance, fashioning for their new saint a martyr’s past and a new iden-
tity. None of this was particularly unusual in twelfth-century England. What
made William different from other saints of the time was his abrupt transi-
tion from the mundane to the holy. This was a development which needed
explaining, particularly as William’s unremarkable former existence was a
serious obstacle to his sanctity in the minds of his contemporaries. It there-
fore lay at the door of his advocate and hagiographer, Thomas of Monmouth,
to justify William’s place among the saints. In this respect, Thomas’s Life and
Miracles provides a valuable and unique insight into the saint-making process
in medieval England.
This chapter has employed anthropological models based on gendered
nature/culture symbolism in order to show how two stories run side-by-side
in the Life and Miracles: that of William the ‘natural’ boy, and that of William
the culturally-constructed martyr. These seemingly irreconcilable discourses
are, however, resolved in Thomas’s text with the help of a surprising narra-
tive device: women. Drawing on feminist poststructual readings of the
nature/culture dichotomy, the chapter has suggested that, rather than being
‘consigned fully to the category of nature’, the female characters appearing in
the story are given both ‘synthesising’ and ‘conversionary’ roles.
Is it a coincidence that these conversionary characters are all women?
Anthropology would suggest not. As we have seen, women are often thought
of as agents of conversion who, in utilizing their domestic and maternal
skills, transform natural raw products into cultural artefacts. Female ‘symbols
of continuity’ and conversion were in existence well before the modern era
and it is likely that Thomas of Monmouth understood the power and influ-
ence of such a discourse, and harnessed it for his own purposes in the Life
and Miracles. The result is a hagiographical drama in which ordinary women
unusually take leading roles.
125
Anne E. Bailey
Whether or not we choose to read Thomas’s female characters in this way,
one thing is certain. The women of Norwich who figure so prominently in
the Life and Miracles provided Thomas with a useful narrative strategy which
aided him in promoting his cause. In carrying William over the nature/
culture divide, women such as Leviva, Legarda and Botilda span the awkward
conceptual gap between murder victim and holy martyr, and lead audiences
through a difficult transitional time. Conflicting memorial discourses merge
under the influence of these hagiographical women, and finally blend into a
smooth – or a relatively smooth – time-and-memory continuum.
126
8
Re-membering Saintly Relocations: The

Rewriting of Saint Congar’s Life within the
Gendered Context of Romance Narratives
Pamela E. Morgan
I n his introduction to Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, Jeffery Jerome

Cohen argues that ‘gender, like time and space, is continually negoti-
ated, continually in the act of becoming’. In his discussion of ‘how ideas
and ideologies of masculinity were regarded and elaborated in the Middle
Ages’ he suggests that such elaborations offer ‘moments in which we can
observe the performance of masculinity and masculinity in performance’.1
This essay proposes that the twelfth-century vita of the sixth-century Saint
Congar, dismissed by the Oxford Dictionary of Saints as ‘concocted at Wells’
and as ‘a hotch-potch of hagiographical and folkloric elements mainly drawn
from the Lives of other Welsh saints’, provides just such an opportunity.2
The representation of Congar – the obscure eponymous saint of Congres-
bury in Somerset – within this vita will be explored in terms of his rejec-
tion and/or appropriation of differing masculinities in his ‘life-journey’ as he
establishes himself as a successful and powerful saint within the terms and
context of the narrative. The twelfth-century dating of the text places the
narrative in a liminal space on two sets of significant boundaries – a chron-
ological boundary between the Anglo-Saxon and Norman eras in Britain,
and a literary boundary between the genres of romance and hagiography.
The notion of liminality, as developed by the social anthropologists Victor
and Edith Turner, is therefore a powerful concept here, as it illuminates the
nature of those processes in the narrative where conflict and/or connection
between different systems give rise to change and development and the crea-
tion of new identities. As Victor Turner suggests:
1 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages
(New York, 2000), p. xiii.
2 David Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th edn (Oxford, 2004), pp. 118–19.
127
Pamela E. Morgan
The attributes of liminality or liminal personae (‘threshold people’) are neces-
sarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through
the network of classification that normally locates states and positions in
cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt
and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention
and ceremonial.3
In this present essay, Congar is viewed as a liminal figure in the ‘betwixt

and between’ of significant boundaries, in a narrative that has been formed,
transformed and relocated across time and through a variety of memoriali-
zations, retellings and purposeful re-creations. What appears to be a simple
unsophisticated narrative is in fact a palimpsestic, multilayered record which
repays close attention. This essay suggests that liminal elements of the repre-
sentation of the saint are crucial to the refashioning of ‘memories’ and ideas
of Anglo-Saxon England in an Anglo-Norman context. Exploration of the
performance of masculinities in a discourse that incorporates elements of
the emergent genre of romance within a hagiographic framework offers a
valuable perspective on this.
The earliest (although incomplete) form of the vita is to be found, in an
ironic quasi-palimpsestic transformation of the manuscript, on a fragment
of parchment which has survived only because it had been re-used as the
cover of a seventeenth-century paper book preserved in the archives of Wells
Cathedral.4 Although the edges have been clipped, the fragment contains
almost all of the Vita Sancti Cungari, written in a late-twelfth-century hand.
Prior to its discovery, it had been assumed that the earliest record of the
vita was that included in Wynkyn de Worde’s Nova Legenda Anglie of 1516.5
The text in the Wells fragment begins with a title and a list of chapter
headings (including those for the last five, missing chapters) and these are
then repeated at the beginnings of the chapters throughout the body of the
text. The chapter headings correspond to the narrative of events in the later,
augmented version. A close comparison of the vita in the Wells fragment
3 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Ithaca, NY, 1969), p. 95.

4 The fragment was given to the Library at Wells Cathedral in 1918 and is now in the Wells
Cathedral Archives (DC/ADM8/10). A transcription of the fragment was published
by the antiquarian J. P. Armitage-Robinson, together with some critical notes, as ‘A
Fragment of the Life of St Cungar’, Journal of Theological Studies 20 (1918–19), 97–108.
The Rev. Canon Doble published a partial translation and commentary in two parts.
G. H. Doble, ‘St Congar’, Antiquity 19 (1945–46), 32–43 and 85–95. A more detailed
description of the fragment is in Pamela Morgan, ‘Saints and Edges in Anglo-Saxon
Britain’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (forthcoming 2015), which also contains a critical
translation of the whole of the Vita Sancti Cungari. All quotations are taken from this
edition. The translations are my own.
5 Nova Legenda Anglie, ed. C. Horstman (Oxford, 1901). The Vita Sancti Cungari is one
of a group of fifteen lives that was added to Wynkyn de Worde’s 1516 edition; the
previous edition (1499) contained none of them.
128
Re-membering Saintly Relocations
with the corresponding narrative in the Nova Legenda Anglie shows that
changes to the later version are mainly in terms of style rather than content.6
This, together with the inclusion of the chapter headings in the Wells frag-
ment, allows some confidence that the last five chapters do not depart widely
from the twelfth-century version and permits a reading of the whole of the
narrative in that social, cultural and historical setting.7 The narrative is thus
firmly placed in a liminal space on the boundary between the Anglo-Saxon
and the Anglo-Norman eras.8 The aim of this essay is to explore the portrayal
of Congar in this twelfth-century context through an interrogation of the
differing modes of masculinity he is presented as performing as his narra-
tive unfolds. Building on Judith Butler’s premise that ‘gender is an iden-
tity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space though a
stylized repetition of acts’, this essay will look at the evolving cultural and
literary contexts in which the vita was elaborated, with a focus on the social
constructs of differing masculinities that are integral to the narrative.9 It
will also take into account the permeability of the boundaries between the
genres of hagiography and romance literature in this historical context. It will
suggest that significant aspects of the Anglo-Saxon past could be memorial-
ized and idealized effectively within the literature of the post-conquest era
through particular aspects of Congar’s gendered performance.10
6 There is a consistent effort to improve the quality of the Latin and to tone down a
predilection for alliteration and the use of phrases packed with words from the same
root.
7 Discussion of the content of the last five chapters takes into account the later provenance
of the text.
8 The permeability of the boundaries between Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman literature
and cultural practices is discussed in detail in R. A. Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon
England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge, 2005) and Anglo-Saxonism and the
Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainsville, FL,
1997).
9 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and
London, 1990), p. 140.
10 Medieval historians and gender theorists have explored the subject of medieval male
masculinity in the last two decades, building on the ground-breaking collection of
essays edited by Clare Lees, Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages
(Minneapolis, MN and London, 1994). Other volumes followed which further explored
the subject of the medieval performance of maleness and masculinities, including J.
J. Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York, 2000);
Jacqueline Murray, Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval
West (London, 1999); and Patricia H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis, Holiness and
Masculinity in the Middle Ages (Toronto, 2005). More recently Jennifer Thibodeaux,
ed., Negotiating Clerical Identities, Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages
(Basingstoke, 2010) has focused specifically on clerical gender. Particularly useful is
the exploration of the miles Christi in Liz Herbert McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms,
Gender, Space and the Solitary Life (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 11–42.
129
Pamela E. Morgan
There are anomalies in this twelfth-century vita which have caused some
dismay to earlier commentators, whose concerns lay with establishing the
‘real Saint Congar’.11 The antiquarian J. Armitage Robinson, who was the first
to transcribe the text in the Wells fragment (motivated more by a desire to
establish the authorship through comparison of its style with a number of
Welsh vitae), describes it as ‘pure fiction’, ‘a work of the imagination’ and of
‘no historical worth’. He does, however, concede that it might throw ‘light on
the conception of saintliness entertained by the writer’.12 Canon G. H. Doble
(the only other English commentator to assess the work) attempts to establish
the ‘true story of a once well-known saint’ and provides a partial translation.13
These approaches, however, neglect details and nuances that give insight into
the multilayered representation of the saint in the context in which it was
written. A more complete translation suggests, first, that the hagiographical
and romance elements interconnect in this narrative, in particular, blur-
ring the ideals of chivalric and religious performances of masculinity; and,
second, that this reciprocity can be interpreted as a feature of the underlying
purposes of the twelfth-century hagiographer.
The romance narratives that are pertinent to this study are the insular
romances of the Anglo-Normans and their related Middle English romances,
the group termed the ‘Matter of England’. These narratives include some of
the earliest examples of this emergent genre.14 The romances that consti-
tute this group have as their subject matter the exploits of heroes who are
linked to geographical areas of England in ways that are suggestive of earlier
oral storytelling roots.15 R. A. Rouse suggests that the Matter of England
11 This study will not explore the ‘identity’ of Saint Congar, although other scholars
have theorized on this matter. David Farmer in The Oxford Dictionary of Saints states
that Congar is sixth-century and (on the evidence of place names) that he is one of
the Welsh missionary saints who founded Christian communities in Somerset and
Devon (Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, pp. 118–19). In the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, however, Marios Costambeys points out that place-name evidence
is inconclusive and that the earliest written evidence for the site of the minster of
Congresbury is in Asser’s Life of Alfred, where Asser relates that the minsters of
Congresbury and Banwell were gifted to him by Alfred in 886 (Marios Costambeys,
‘Cyngar (supp. fl. early 8th cent.)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford,
2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6910 [accessed 19 December 2013]).
The earliest datable reference to Congar is in the eleventh-century Secgan be þam
Godes Sanctum, the Old English list of saints’ resting places, deriving from Wessex, in
which he is already associated with Congresbury. See D. W. Rollason, ‘Lists of Saints’
Resting Places in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England 7 (1978), 61–94.
12 Armitage Robinson, ‘A Fragment of the Life of Saint Cungar’, p. 104.
13 Doble, ‘St Congar’, p. 32.
14 For a discussion of the romances that are designated ‘Matter of England’, see Rosalind
Field, ‘The Curious History of the Matter of England’, in Boundaries in Medieval
Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 29–42.
15 Romance or ‘roman’, originally the term for a narrative that originated from the
130
romances, in both their Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions, are
historically based narratives that blend a popular understanding of the past
with an enduring interest in the figures of England’s Anglo-Saxon era.16
Furthermore, he suggests that these more ‘popular’ romances of the period
incorporate significant aspects of the Anglo-Saxon past. These aspects are
then idealized, appropriated and acquire functionality in this literature of
the post-conquest Anglo-Norman era, as part of a palimpsestic process of
the cultural appropriation of the Anglo-Saxon past. In her study of the same
group of poems, Susan Crane has identified a ‘fruitful interaction’ between
the Anglo-Norman romances and the chronicles ‘inspired by Norman rule’
and suggests:
Both the chronicles and the Anglo-Norman romances of English heroes glorify
England’s past, with the direct or secondary effect of justifying Norman pres-
ence in England.17
Crane further describes the English hero in these romances as ‘an adopted
ancestor whose exploits and nobility establish and enhance the status of the
insular aristocracy’.18 In this way, a connection is made between the Anglo-
Saxon past of a hero and his re-presentation in an Anglo-Norman present
– a palimpsestic intermingling of heroic identities which disrupts traditional
temporal linearity but allows the hero an important multivalence. I suggest
that these cultural processes can also be discerned in the narrative of Congar,
in which he too is represented as a ‘saintly hero’, a liminal figure between
the cultural systems of the hagiographic and romance genres. Indeed, the
twelfth-century hagiographic account of his life also incorporates elements
vernacular, gave its name to the genre of narratives emerging within Latin-based
languages. Medieval English romance was influenced by the continental and Anglo-
Norman traditions, for a discussion of which see Judith Weiss’s chapter, ‘Insular
Beginnings: Anglo-Norman Romance’, in A Companion to Romance: From Classical
to Contemporary, ed. Corinne Saunders (Oxford, 2007), pp. 26–44. Other useful
collections of essays which cover the developing and mutually influenced genres of
romance and hagiography are Neil Cartlidge (ed.), Boundaries in Medieval Romance
(Cambridge, 2008); Paul Cavill (ed.), The Christian Tradition in Anglo-Saxon England
(New York, 2004); Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows and Morgan Dickson (eds), Medieval
Insular Romance, Translation and Innovation (Cambridge, 2000); and Anne B.
Thompson, Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in the South English Legendary
(Aldershot, 2003).
16 Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 54–5.
17 Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle
English Literature (Berkeley, CA, 1986), p. 15. Crane points out that English heroes are
the subject of half of the romances in Anglo-Norman dialect that we know of today
– the Romance of Horn, Lai d’Haveloc, Boeve de Haumtone, Gui de Warewic, Foulke le
Fitz Waryn and Waldef – and that every Anglo-Norman romance of this group had
an English descendant, although the Middle English Fulk and Waldef are lost.
18 Crane, Insular Romance, p. 23.
131
Pamela E. Morgan
of the emergent genre of romance and utilizes memories of an Anglo-Saxon
past, in Congar’s case with particular reference to the appropriation and
ownership of property in a specific Anglo-Norman present. As noted at the
beginning of this essay, the Oxford Dictionary of Saints suggests that the
vita was ‘concocted’ at Wells. The situation of the Chapter of Wells, which
was enmeshed in a set of complicated ongoing property disputes, suggests
a context where the lands, church and the eponymous saint at Congres-
bury were part of the long power struggles that were waged by the bishops
of Bath and Wells from the episcopate of Giso at the end of the eleventh
century, through the twelfth century and into the thirteenth.19 This would
provide a feasible context for a narrative to be used as part of a process of
rewriting the Anglo-Saxon past to validate the acquisition of land, property
and wealth in an Anglo-Norman context, a narrative which describes an
essentially masculine process of competition for land, property and status
through power, dominance and strength, incorporating (possibly wistfully)
the notion of the hero of romance who fought for and always attained his
desired object, whatever that might be. As part of this rewriting of the narra-
tive, the saintly hero becomes a liminal figure with attributes derived from
both hagiography and romance.
In the opening chapters of this ostensibly hagiographic narrative, Congar is
credited with a noble lineage as the eagerly awaited, only son of the Emperor
and Empress of Byzantium:
Dum quidam constantinopolitanus imperator ab imperatrice Luciria nominata
speraret generare prolem.
(There was once an emperor of Constantinople who hoped to have children
with his Empress Lucira.)20
19 The church and estate at Congresbury were granted to Dudoc, Bishop of Wells (1033–
60) by King Cnut, prior to Dudoc’s becoming bishop (J. Armitage Robinson, ‘The
Early Endowment of the See of Wells’, in The Saxon Bishops of Wells, A Historical
Study in the Tenth Century, British Academy supplemental papers IV (1918), pp. 52–5).
In his will Dudoc left Congresbury, together with other bequests, to Wells Cathedral.
However, Earl Harold with Archbishop Stigand together persuaded King Edward to
annul Dudoc’s will in 1061 and the estate and minster returned to the king and thence
to Earl Harold. In 1066 Congresbury was held by King Harold and in 1086 it still
belonged to King William (The Domesday Book, 8 Somerset, ed. C. Thorn and F. Thorn
(Chichester, 1980), 1.21). A detailed account of Giso (Dudoc’s successor at Wells in
1061) and his subsequent struggles to establish the property rights and status of Wells
can be found in Simon Keynes, ‘Giso, Bishop of Wells (1061–1088)’, Anglo-Norman
Studies 19 (1997), 203–71. Despite Giso’s efforts, Congresbury remained in the hands
of the king until King John granted it to Jocelin, Bishop of Bath and Bishop of Wells
(1206–42). Bishop Jocelin, in turn, granted the church and estates to the Dean and
Chapter of Wells in 1237.
20 Vita Sancti Cungari (VSC), Ch. 1. The translation is my own. The imperial couple are
blessed with a son after prayers and alms have ‘cured’ the Empress’s barrenness.
132
This nobility of birth is an essential trope shared by both genres – hagiog-
raphy and romance. The choice of Byzantium is in itself a distant ‘romantic’
locus for the beginning of the life-journey that Congar makes in his quest
for sainthood. The vita of Saint Congar includes few women and gives little
attention to their role or agency: his mother (the Empress Luciria), his puta-
tive betrothed (the unnamed daughter of a most noble king) and a reference
to followers of both sexes lamenting his departure for Wales are the sum
total. The focus of the narrative is wholly on the saint and can be viewed as
a discourse of the performance of different forms and modes of masculinity.
The early stages of Congar’s life particularly exemplify this, where the perfor-
mance of holy masculinity is defined against the conventions of masculinity
associated with a hero of romance. The description of the young Congar’s
life-style contains much that is a prerequisite for the boy who aspires to the
masculinity of the noble knight in romance fiction, but his actions do not
conform to those expectations:
Quando debuerat venari per nemora, latenter adibat divinum oratorium,
repetita saepissime oratione dominica. Quando cogeretur etiam a curialibus
ludere a leis, discedebat illis invitis, festinando ad ecclesiastica oracula. Ibi
remanens et genuflectens cum eximio affectu orabat.
(When he had been supposed to be hunting in the woods, he secretly
approached a holy place of prayer, repeating most often the Lord’s Prayer. And
also, whenever he was asked to play dice at court, he avoided these invitations
so that he might hurry to a place of prayer; he prayed there, remaining and
kneeling with exceptional fervour.)21
Whilst Congar is described as possessing the natural attributes of the nobly

born – he is of a good natural disposition, handsome and without fault,
generous to his friends and a youth of proper conduct – he rejects the oppor-
tunities to learn the courtly arts of hunting, riding and playing games with
dice. Thus, the writer of the vita emphasises Congar’s holiness through a
rejection of chivalric modes of masculinity at this youthful stage.22 Jacque-
line Murray explores the redefinition of gender identity amongst men who
‘moved from a secular world that defined masculine behaviour in terms of
military prowess and sexual virility to enter a milieu that eschewed both’ and
21 VSC, Ch. 3.
22 Helen Phillips points out that Lancelot Du Lac is portrayed (in the French tradition)
as naturally endowed with qualities of ‘generosity, leadership of other boys, modesty,
handsomeness, moderation and respect for noble men’, but is taught other knightly
skills such as hunting, riding, chess and backgammon. See Helen Phillips, ‘Rites of
Passage in French and English Romances’, in Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in
the Fourteenth Century, ed. Nicola F. McDonald and W. M. Ormrod (York, 2004), pp.
83–107, quotation at p. 90.
133
Pamela E. Morgan
how masculine strength was redefined in a holy context.23 One aspect that
she highlights is the attraction of horsemanship, which she includes amongst
the trappings of worldly masculinity.24 Congar’s behaviour in rejecting the
physical pleasures of hunting and riding with the young men of the imperial
court and instead hurrying to spend long periods of time kneeling in prayer
instances a similar demonstration of physical endurance – a performance of
strength as a holy man. Here again, Congar is a liminal figure, transgressing
the boundaries of these developing genres.
In his consideration of the nature of what ‘being male in the middle ages’
involves, Vern Bullough suggests a triad of ‘impregnating women, protecting
dependents, and serving as a provider to one’s family’.25 The next, crucial,
stage of Congar’s life, therefore, requires a response from the young man
to the possibility of engagement with the opposite sex. As accounts of his
charm, beauty and naturally good disposition circulate, Congar is desired as
a potential marriage partner for the daughters of neighbouring kings and
queens:
Forma eius erat decora et inenarrabilis, [propter] quod multi reges et reginae
desiderabant copulare talem filiabus suis. Audiebant enim illum esse amatorem
largitatis et adornatum moribus legitimis. Interea consensu parentum et
compatriotarum cuisusdam regis nobilissimi filia pacta est illi cum honore
utriusque regni.
(He was indescribably handsome; on account of which many kings and queens
desired to unite such a man with their daughters. They heard him to be truly
fond of generosity and his good behaviour reflected well on him. In the mean-
time with the agreement of his parents and fellow countrymen, the daughter
of a most noble king was promised to him, to the honour of both countries.)26
It is of course a hagiographical convention that the youthful behaviour of the

future saint marks him out from his companions, but here the description of
Congar, with its emphasis on his male beauty, his ‘indescribable handsome-
ness’ and his generosity of character and thus his suitability as a marriage
partner, has greater resonances of the romantic than the hagiographic.
Congar departs the court, rejecting the opportunity of acquiring the
worldly masculine attributes of power and status through marriage and the
23 Jacqueline Murray, ‘Masculinizing the Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for
Chastity and Monastic Identity’, in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed.
Patricia H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Toronto, 2005), pp. 24–42 (p. 25).
24 Murray, ‘Masculinizing the Religious Life’, p. 31.
25 Vern Bullough, ‘On Being Male in the Middle Ages’, in Medieval Masculinities:
Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare Lees (Minneapolis, MN and London,
1994), pp. 31–45 (p. 34).
26 VSC, Ch. 3.
134
chance to perform the very masculine role of husband. His strength in so
doing will be rewarded at a much higher holy level:
Ille autem caducam potestatem despiciens, et quod [est] perpetuum immo
eligens virginitatem inviolatam servans, sub vili amictu discessit ab imperiali
curia, nulli revelans quod cogitabat.
(He, however, despising transitory power and choosing, on the contrary, that
which is eternal for the soul, keeping his virginity intact, in the disguise of a
poor man he left the imperial court, telling no-one what he was considering.)27
Congar needs to avoid an arranged marriage in order to achieve the chaste

masculinity of the ascetic saint. His desire to keep his virginity intact is part
of the holy chastity required of a saint. As JoAnn Macnamara asserts in her
review of the multiple and competing modes of masculinity in the creation
of the gender of the chaste male and his potency, ‘[m]en who actively resisted
seduction transformed their vulnerability into virile ascendancy.’28 Addition-
ally, Joan Cadden has noted the high value placed on virginity, suggesting,
‘[i]t was an active expression of the love of God, a vehicle of humility, a token
of the rejection of the world and a representation of mystical purity.’29 Congar
has asserted his power as an individual man to achieve these things. As
noted above in Turner’s delineation of ‘liminal personae’, Congar is ‘slip(ping)
through the network of classification that normally locates states and posi-
tions in cultural space’.30
Congar leaves, we are told, in the conventional disguise of a beggar, the
trope of ‘hero as beggar’ being both a common romance and an eremitic
trope. In his review of the significance of different kinds of disguise in a
selection of twelfth-century texts, Morgan Dickson suggests that the experi-
ence of taking a lower status is an educative one for the protagonist, asserting:
The outward ‘lowering’ of social status suggests that while in disguise the hero
steps beyond his familiar surroundings while remaining essentially the same:
he maintains the same interior identity.31
Dickson also points out that the experience is intergeneric, being a part of
the learning trajectory of both the romance hero and the saint. There is no
27 VSC, Ch. 3.
28 JoAnn Macnamara, ‘An Unresolved Syllogism – The Search for a Christian Gender
System’, in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West,
ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York and London, 1999, pp. 1–24 (p. 9).
29 Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and
Culture (Cambridge, 1993), p. 260.
30 Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 95.
31 Morgan Dickson, ‘Verbal and Visual Disguise: Society and Identity in Some Twelfth
Century Texts’, in Medieval Insular Romance, ed. Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows and
Morgan Dickson (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 41–54 (p. 41).
135
Pamela E. Morgan
exploration here of the inner life of Congar and the device would, in many
ways, seem to be simply a construct necessary for Congar’s escape. Whilst
the inclusion of the trope of disguise also adds tension that properly belongs
to the romance, the fact that the disguise is that of a beggar lends nuances of
holy poverty to the narrative – as, for example, in the vita of Martin of Tours
when the saint tears his cloak to share it with a beggar and is then mocked
as a beggar himself.32 There are also resonances of the story of Saint Alexis,
who achieved virginity within his arranged marriage but then departed on
pilgrimage; he is mourned as lost by parents and wife, and they fail to recog-
nize him when he returns as a beggar but give him alms and allow him to
live on their charity, until his identity is revealed upon his death.33
The inclusion of the trope of the beggar disguise, therefore, can be
perceived as another intergeneric resonance between romance and hagiog-
raphy, especially as its function here in the Congar narrative seems to be
more to add to the suspense and entertainment value of the story rather
than to emphasize his desire for poverty and humility. In hagiographical
terms Congar is demonstrating a holy, masculine strength in his rejection
of the betrothal but here, in the courtly context of his departure from the
Emperor’s court, the emphasis is on the dismay of the court, the emperor and
the citizens, who love him and want him to remain as a noble youth, more
than on his desire for holiness and spiritual destiny. A narrative tension is
built up in the description of the chase as he heads for the sea followed by
the citizenry of Constantinople with orders from the emperor to detain him
and take him back. It is resolved when he is rescued at the last minute by a
ship with sails set, ready to carry him away across the sea to a new country:
His peractis, post discessionem unici filii lugebant parentes, et cives dediti
mesticie iussu imperatorio secuti sunt iuvenem Cungarum fugientem et si
possent inventum occupare, occupatum caperent et reducerent invitum ad
imperatorem. Illis venientibus cum magna festinatione ad equoreum litus,
ecce navis prompta erat ad transfretandum iuvenis videns illos sequentes et
ventorum prosperitatem et paratum navigium, intravit in velatam navem: et sic
veniens prospere ad equoream marginem, devitavit odiosam persecutionem.
(After these events, the parents lamented the departure of their only son, and
the citizens, given over to sadness, at the command of the Emperor, followed
the young fugitive Congar hoping that if they could find and seize him, they
might return him an unwilling captive, to the Emperor. However, when they
came in great haste to the seashore, behold! a ship was prepared and ready to
carry him away. The young man aware of his pursuers and also of the favour-
32 ‘The Life of Martin of Tours by Sulpicius Serverus’, in Early Christian Lives, ed. and
trans. Carolinne White (London, 1998), pp. 137–8.
33 In her discussion of abstinence, Cadden instances Saint Alexis as ‘the married virgin
best known to medievalists’ as his story exists in ‘medieval vernaculars from Middle
English to Portuguese’, Meanings of Sex Difference, p. 260.
136
able nature of the wind and the ready ship, embarked on the ship which had
its sails set and in this way, coming safely to the far shore he avoided hateful
persecution.)34
Although the narrative is interspersed with comments regarding God’s

purpose for him, the account of Congar’s departure from the court could
equally be describing a young prince or noble at the beginning of a chivalric
quest or a chase narrative. Sea voyages are a prevalent motif in medieval
romances, particularly so in insular romances such as Bevis of Hamptoun
and Guy of Warwick, where many of the preoccupations are with passage to
and from exile and quest, and where the protagonist’s exterior voyage mirrors
his internal journey.35 The sea, as a fluid, encompassing but also traversable
boundary that plays a significant role in the insular romances of the Matter
of England, also offers Congar, in this hagiographic narrative, an opportunity
to follow his quest for the life to which he aspires.
Congar’s development from youth to manhood as he establishes his indi-
viduality and independence from his family is defined against the romantic
elements in the narrative. He shuns the worldly, physical pursuits of horse-
riding and hunting and, rather than choosing sexual fulfilment, is empow-
ered by his desire for chastity – an impetus to achieve his holy quest. It is
possible to perceive a range of resonances within this narrative of Congar’s
life-journey as he ‘becomes a man’, elaborating the conventional ideology of
the masculine saint where the quest for holiness through testing is resonant
of the quest for manhood in the chivalry of romance. The liminal aspects of
the character of Congar are multifaceted at this point of the narrative. The
notion of the ‘liminar’, who has to achieve status through the appropriate
rites of passage, is combined with the liminal figure ‘betwixt and between’
the genres of hagiography and romance.
In the next stages of his life (Chapters 6 to 16) we see Congar as a mature
man performing a different mode of holy masculinity. Here again his narra-
tive participates in a process that entwines the representation of the strong
and saintly religious with that of the secular, powerful knight winning and
defending property through essentially masculine performances. As in other
devotional and religious writing of the time, there is the same complex inter-
34 VSC, Ch. 4.
35 Beves of Hampton journeys from England to the Armenian court of King Ermin and
travels extensively as he proves his valour and his love for Josian before he returns to
England (via the Isle of Wight) to regain his heritage. See The Romance of Sir Beves
of Hamtoun, ed. Eugen Kölbing, EETS e.s. 46, 48, 65 (London, 1985–94 [repr. as 1
vol., 1973]). Guy of Warwick, in a narrative which has close links to that of St Alexis,
leaves his marriage to prove his valour and strength in the Holy Land before his return
home. See The Romance of Guy of Warwick: Edited from the Auchinleck Manuscript in
the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, and from MS 107 in Caius College, Cambridge, ed.
Julius Zupita, EETS e.s. 42, 49, 59 (Bungay, 1883, 1887, 1891 [repr. London, 1966]).
137
Pamela E. Morgan
textuality as can be seen in a broad range of Church writings that use the
imagery of the milites Christi or the ‘Knights of Christ’.36 In her monograph
on medieval anchoritisms Liz Herbert McAvoy traces the origins and devel-
opment of the term miles Christi as part of her exploration of the nature
of male anchoritism and its self-reflexive expression of its own masculinity.
She explores anxieties about the ways in which enclosure might compro-
mise masculine identity and highlights the responsive use of the aggres-
sive masculinity of the miles Christi together with the strength to be gained
from the chaste, inviolate state of celibacy.37 Congar heads towards his soli-
tary hermitage, rejecting the courtly, chivalric role in favour of that of the
strong, celibate solitary that he desires to be. His performance of masculinity
in defence of his desired space will prove to be a forceful and aggressive
response in his dealings with the secular rulers he encounters, in a fashion
that reflects the masculinity performed by the male anchorites that form the
focus of McAvoy’s analysis.
Congar is introduced in this narrative as the only son of the Emperor
of Byzantium and his wife, Luciria, heir to a life at a centre of worldly and
religious power. He rejects this heritage, travelling across Europe and its seas
to a new location on the periphery not only of Europe but also of England
itself – Congresbury in Somerset. In common with many other eremitical
saints, he travels to find isolation, but in doing so creates and appropriates a
new significant space. This new space is spiritually significant to him as saint
and, in this narrative, geographically significant to the audience for whom
this hagiographical text is intended. Congar is shown turning his back on a
location imbued with worldly and religious power, and represented as being
drawn by spiritual impulse and divine guidance to the special and, impor-
tantly (for the audience), local place, Congresbury, which becomes the text’s
core location. Congar’s powerful and successful appropriation and ownership
of this geographical space becomes the focus of the next stage of his narra-
tive. The vita emphasizes the ways in which Congar creates and establishes
ownership of his personal space within this core location. His actions on
arrival at his chosen location, although often adhering to the standard hagi-
ographical tropes, establish boundaries and demarcate significant spaces:
Relatis his verbis construxit habitulaculum hinc […] titus cimiterium. Hoc
emenso, fundavit in honore sancte trinitatis oratorium.
36 In Marie de France’s translation of St. Patrick’s Purgatory from Latin to French, she
transforms the protagonist, Owain, into a chivalric knight/pilgrim and the purgatorial
text into a pseudo-romance. St Patrick’s Purgatory, A Poem by Marie de France, ed. and
trans. M. J. Curley (New York, 1993).
37 McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms, pp. 11–43.
138
(Having spoken these words, he built himself a dwelling and measured out
an enclosure (churchyard). Having measured it out he founded an oratory
(church) in honour of the Holy Trinity.)38
In the chapters which follow Congar’s claiming of the location, he performs

a strong and holy masculinity that defends these places from the intrusions
of secular rulers. In the same way that the heroes of romances must fight to
defend their property rights, Congar must establish his rights to the sacred
space he has appropriated. At this point in the narrative there are apparent
anomalies and inconsistencies. It would seem that inclusion of two Anglo-
Saxon kings who lived their lives centuries apart, Ine (d. 726) and Edgar
(d. 975), is a clumsy anachronism. However, it can also be perceived as a
palimpsestic process at work in the text, where time is appropriated and
Congar’s heroic masculinity is enhanced through a disruption of the progres-
sive linear time of his ‘becoming a man’, transforming it into a much more
organic, cyclical and fluid presentation of the hero.
Ine grants the land to Congar in recognition of Congar’s miracles – partic-
ularly those which have transformed the land from marshy wilderness to
fertile meadows.39 The terms on which Ine grants Congar this land are such
that it is to be inviolate and that Congar’s prayers are not to be interrupted
by Ine himself or (oddly enough) the noisy behaviour of the king’s soldiers.
Succeeding kings are said to have respected these directives:
His peractis ceteri successores reges non ausi sunt. nec consueti visitare nec
etiam videre, locum venerabilem.
(Once these things had been done, other succeeding kings, in the same way,
did not dare to visit nor even to glimpse the holy place.)40
One of the features that Rouse discerns in the Matter of England romances
is the cultural reputation of Anglo-Saxon England as a legal ‘golden age’. He
highlights the preoccupation with local and regional concerns and explores
the ways in which the Anglo-Saxon era operated as a useful cultural domain
in which to situate the origins of English law:
Although English law after the conquest increasingly became a melange of
both Anglo-Saxon laws and post-conquest legal innovation, it was all imagined
to have sprung from a common source of ancient English law.41
38 VSC, Ch. 7. This formula is repeated, together with detailed references to physical
aspects of the places (its waters and its woods) and the buildings that he constructs,
on other similar occasions in the text, both in England and in Wales.
39 VSC, Ch. 9.
40 VSC, Ch. 11.
41 Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 97.
139
Pamela E. Morgan
We can see here another palimpsestic use of time, functioning within a
legal context, and thus satisfying the requirement for an ancient provenance
for post-conquest English law. Rouse also gives as an example of this the
story of Beves of Hamtoun and his struggle to assert his rights of owner-
ship and inheritance. The same process takes place in Congar’s narrative,
where Congar, as male subordinate to an idealized and powerful Anglo-
Saxon monarch, is rewarded and acquires status, power and dominance
regarding the ownership of the land. The inclusion of King Ine effectively
situates the narrative in the context of a palimpsestic memorialization of a
golden age of Anglo-Saxon law-making and, in this way, validates further
Congar’s ownership of the land in the Anglo-Norman present of the text. As
in a palimpsest, the memories of the Anglo-Saxon laws ‘bleed through’ to the
Anglo-Norman context in a complex interaction that disrupts the temporal
linearity of traditional hagiographic narratives and creates additional layers
of meaning within the apparently simple text.
In the next chapter (Chapter 13) Congar’s status as owner of the land is
questioned by another Anglo-Saxon king. At first reading, in addition to the
disruption of any notion of temporal linearity and ‘progressive’ time-scale,
it is puzzling that the king who breaks the prohibition is the King Edgar,
Rex Admirabilis often described as ‘the peaceful’, who was closely involved
in the tenth-century reforms of the English Church and who is eulogized in
two separate short verse sections of the Anglo Saxon Chronicles.42 However,
in the Matter of England romances there is another portrayal of Edgar, as
the unjust king in the romance Beves of Hamtoun who deprives Beves of
his inheritance but who ultimately retains his kingdom only through Beves’
defeat of a German emperor who has been occupying his lands. The vita’s
portrayal of Edgar, who is hunting and inadvertently trespasses on Cong-
ar’s sacred space, partakes more of the misguided king from the Matter of
England romance tradition than the religious reforming monarch of the
Chronicles.43 The manner in which Edgar is presented in the narrative and
the fact that his transgression (apparently) results in his early death, despite
his appeals to other religious to pray for him, allows a reading of Congar
as a rightfully dominant male (supported by a divinely patriarchal structure
and the wrath of an omnipotent God). This establishes Congar as a powerful
religious who, in an even more complex disruption of temporal linearity, has
dominance over many other (unspecified) kings:
42 These sections comprise the coronation of Edgar in the entry for 973 and his death in
975.
43 A comprehensive review of a range of aspects of Edgar’s life can be found in Donald
Scragg (ed.), Edgar, King of the English 959–957: New Interpretations (Woodbridge,
2008).
140
Multi itaque reges prius huius loci reuerentiam et priuilegium violare timuerant,
et precedentium successores amplius, audito hoc miraculo, timuerunt.
(And so, many kings had previously been afraid to violate the reverence and
privileges of this place, and when their successors heard of this miracle, they
were even more afraid.)44
Both Anglo-Saxon kings differentially affirm Congar in his place in a patri-

archal structure where ownership of land is power and an affirmation of a
particular kind of masculinity. This process of appropriation of place, defining
boundaries and simultaneously exploiting their permeability, contributes to
the construction of an idea of an Anglo-Saxon England that conforms in
many ways to the world of Romance, but remains anchored in a familiar
and known geography. This is a construction of Anglo-Saxon England that
represents both the Anglo-Norman desire to project itself into the past and
an appropriation of the Anglo-Saxon period as an English past imbricated
firmly in the present. The time barriers here evince a permeability that allows
the past to effectively interact with the present. Congar is a liminal figure
within these interstices and his performance of multiple masculinities utilizes
a connectivity between romance and hagiography that underpins his place
as the eponymous saint of Congresbury. Mary Carruthers, in her discus-
sion of the nature of medieval memory, suggests that a distinctive feature of
medieval scholarship is ‘an utter indifference to the pastness of the past, to
its uniqueness and its integrity on its own terms as we now would say’.45 The
palimpsestic nature of the memories that interact in Congar’s story, within
the narrative where they are a defence of his ownership of his chosen loca-
tions and again in the twelfth-century context of the production of the text,
suggests a complex interplay of memories that is far from indifferent to ‘past-
ness’.
This pattern of behaviour on Congar’s part, having been proved to work
in England, is repeated in the chapters set in Wales. Here, similar attempts
to deprive Congar of territory to which he has been directed by angelic
vision result in dire misfortunes being visited on those kings and princes who
oppose the ‘mild-mannered’ (‘mansuetus’) Congar. King Poulentus is blinded
by Congar when he queries Congar’s right to settle on his land, but is healed
when he acquiesces.46 The challenges come to a climax with a lawsuit where,
in front of many witnesses, the Prince Pebiau, speaking ‘powerfully and with
deceit’ (‘cum vi et fraude’), attempts to deprive Congar of the land that had
44 VSC, Ch. 12.

45 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory, A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd
edn (Cambridge, 2008), p. 239.
46 King Poulentus (Paulinus) of Glamorgan also features in the Vita Sancti Iltuti as the
secular ruler under whom St Illtyd serves prior to becoming a saint.
141
Pamela E. Morgan
been granted to him by King Poulentus.47 Pebiau is liquefied, ‘in the way
that wax becomes liquid by a hot fire, in the sight of all who were there he
melted away to nothing’ (‘ad modum cere ad ignis ardorem liquescentis in
conspectu omnium qui aderant liquescendo annichilatus est’).48 In this way,
Congar has validated his ownership of the space he is claiming, both through
process of law and through the sanction of a divine miracle. A similar ‘venge-
ance miracle’ is performed by the Welsh saint Illtyd when he melts the king’s
stewart Cyflym for demanding tribute:
sed Deus summus ultor fecit illum quasi mollitam et liquifactum ceram ardore
igneo liquescere.
(but God the supreme avenger caused him to melt like wax softened and
rendered liquid by fire.)49
This is an interesting choice of punishment. Congar’s dominant masculinity

is demonstrated by his feminizing of his opponent and a reduction of the
prince to fluidity and weakness (with femininity in the Middle Ages being
consistently associated – at least discursively – with wetness, changeability
and weakness).50 Thus, as an alternative to the secular romance warrior or
knight, Congar again asserts his masculinity effectively as religious protector
of land and of the foundations he has created in these lands.
Saint Congar’s conflicts with secular powers, described above, have shown
him as powerful and dominant within patriarchal power structures and with
contrasting secular and religious masculinities. A third masculine identity
remains to be explored in relation to the Vita Sancti Cungari: the role of the
father as guide and protector (in both secular and religious terms) and the
representation of Congar’s assumption of this role in the last years of his life.
In her introduction to Negotiating Clerical Identity, Thibodeaux reviews the
Gregorian efforts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to elevate the status
of the clergy within society and distinguish them from the laity, claiming:
47 Pebian or Pepiau is noted in the Liber Landavensis as the grandfather of St Dubricius

(Dyfrig), ruler of Ergyng. See The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. J Gwynogfryn
Evans (Oxford, 1893 [rev. imp. Aberystwyth, 1979]).
48 VSC, Ch. 16.
49 Vita S. Iltuti, in The Lives of the Cambro British Saints, ed. and trans. W. Rees (Landovery
and London, 1853), pp. 173 and 483.
50 For a discussion of the medieval theories and debates about the feminine and masculine
types see Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference. Also Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body
and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1992). Chapter 2, ‘Destiny is
Anatomy’, covers the medieval period, pp. 25–62.
142
[They] created this ideal, in part, on the denial of socially recognized forms
of masculine behavior. In some cases, however, they incorporated traditional
masculine values into their spiritual models.51
This reading is supported by Megan McLaughlin, who considers the way

in which many eleventh-century clerics must have struggled to create and
maintain their identity as males within the expectations of the Benedictine
reforms in this period, particularly the way in which celibacy must have
cut them off ‘from the culturally powerful and emotionally very resonant
masculine role of father’. She further points out that:
paradoxically, many medieval clerics did still aspire to fatherhood. While they
obviously could not have biological children as long as they maintained their
celibate status, they were able to construct an identity for themselves as spir-
itual fathers as men who begot and raised ‘children in the faith’.52
In the last years of his life Congar is described as being a powerful father to
the communities that he founds in England and in Wales:
Ipse autem tamquam sollicitus et pater sanctissimus utriusque monasterii
curam gerebat et propria praesentia frequentius recreabat.
(He was a vigilant and saintly father to both monasteries in his care and by
his presence frequently invigorated them.)53
Here, Congar is performing the required role of the paterfamilias in disci-

plining and guiding his offspring. He is also, and importantly, securing their
social space in the geographical locations that he has chosen and developed
for them. He is acting, in accordance with the tenets of the Rule of St Benedict
(where the title of abbot is noted as derived from ‘Abba’ or Father), as the
abbot whose role in the community is to provide a spiritual father to support
and strengthen the individuals in his care in their ascetic effort and spiritual
growth. In Chapter 2 ‘What Sort of Man the Abbot Should Be’, the Rule states
that the abbot should ‘show a master’s fearsome temper and a father’s love’.54
At this stage in his narrative, Congar is father and provider, but also still the
miles Christi in his determination to provide the strength and guidance that
the monks in his care will need to fight the evils and temptations that may
distract them from their vows. He is defined against the secular knight or
soldier whose battles take place in the world outside the monastery. It is not
51 Thibodeaux, Negotiating Clerical Identities, p. 6.

52 Megan McLaughlin, ‘Secular and Spiritual Fatherhood in the Eleventh Century’,
in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed.
Jacqueline Murray (New York and London: Garland, 1999), pp. 25–44 (p. 27).
53 VSC, Ch. 15.
54 The Rule of St Benedict, ed. and trans. Bruce L. Venarde (Cambridge, MA and London,
2011), p. 25.
143
Pamela E. Morgan
until he is confident that both foundations are thriving and successful that
he decides to go on a pilgrimage to Rome and Jerusalem:
cumque videret utrumque monasterium, scilicet in Cungresbiria et quod in
Vallia fundaverat, ambulare et fructifare in timore Dei.
(when he could see that both of the monasteries that he had founded, most
certainly Congresbury and also that which he had founded in Wales, were able
to walk and be fruitful in fear of the Lord.)55
At the conclusion of the vita, the hagiographer ends the life of the man he has
been describing in a manner that is appropriate to both the knight who has
completed his quest and the religious who has fulfilled his holy duty – he was
rewarded as he deserved, by being taken up to heaven, and his body brought
back to Congresbury (‘translatus est usque cugresbiriam’).56 A parallel can
be drawn with the outcome of the insular romance Guy of Warwick, where
the hero rejects his secular role as crusading knight and returns to his home
and hermitage, dedicating his life to God and simultaneously confirming his
ownership of his lands and possessions.
The ending of the narrative is, however, somewhat cursory. One might
have expected Congar’s body and relics to be utilized as, in the phrase coined
by Rollason, ‘an undying landlord’.57 This would continue the theme of the
saint as guardian and owner of the sacred space in Congresbury. It is signifi-
cant, however, that although there are no accounts of post-mortem miracles
at Congresbury, the narrator of the vita suggests that he has witnesses to
attest to the fact that Congar’s body was brought back and laid to rest there,
although an air of uncertainty can be detected:
sicut a maioribus accepimus, a sociis et fidelibus, qui ei indiuidui comites adhe-
serunt, translatus est vsque cugresbiriam, prestante domino nostro iesu christo,
cui est honor et gloria per infinita secula seculorum.
(if we believe our ancestors and families and the faithful, those who were his
faithful companions kept him and brought him back all the way to Congres-
bury, for the sake of our lord Jesus Christ, to whom is honour and glory for
ever and ever.)58
This returns the focus of the narrative to its core location, and the regional
and local aspect of the Congar’s life is emphasized. The ‘undying landlord’ is
(possibly) in residence and the appropriation and ownership of the place is
validated again at the end of and beyond his life in a further disruption of
55 VSC, Ch. 17.

56 VSC, Ch. 17.
57 David Rollason, ‘Undying Landlords’, in Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England
(Oxford, 1989), pp. 196–214.
58 VSC, Ch. 17.
144
temporal linearity, this time bleeding into the present of the narrative and
setting a precedent that is intended to continue to flow into the future.
As discussed above, the historical context of the disputes over land and
property between the clerics of the Chapter at Wells and the crown are
documented and provide a putative context and underlying purpose for the
production of the twelfth-century vita of Saint Congar as validation of the
ownership of Church lands at Congresbury. However, to dismiss the text
preserved on the fragment of parchment at Wells as simply an inexpert and
muddled attempt at story-writing would miss an opportunity to explore how
a seemingly simple account, when carefully considered in its twelfth-century
context, is in fact a palimpsestic discourse that interweaves a complex
melange of aspects of time, gender and memory. The text may have been
‘concocted’ at Wells but it also allows a textual performance of masculinity
that has strong – and overt – political overtones. The liminal nature of the
representation of Congar, a palimpsestic figure absorbing aspects of the past
in his performance of multiple masculinities in the twelfth-century present
of the narrative, repays attention.
145
9
A Man Out of Time: Joseph, Time and Space

in the N-Town Marian Plays
Daisy Black
þow she be meke and mylde,

Withowth mannys company
She myght not be with childe!1
In December 2010, alongside the Dr Who Christmas Special and dysfunc-

tional domestic fare of Eastenders, the BBC included Tony Jordan’s drama-
tization of The Nativity. Depicting Mary as a pregnant teenager threatened
by stoning, the drama simultaneously acknowledged concerns regarding
young motherhood in the UK and the perceived threat of religious cultures
condoning the public execution of women for sexual misdemeanour. This
projection of the preoccupations of a twenty-first-century audience onto a
two-thousand-year-old narrative did not go unnoticed. Journalistic coverage
debated the apparent ‘modernisms’ in the dialogue, accused the BBC of nega-
tive portrayals of Judaism and saw Joseph’s doubt as undermining Mary’s
virgin pregnancy.2 Yet responses to the programme largely ignored the fact
that this depiction of the doubting relationship between Mary and Joseph
was not a new interpretation, but a very old one.
Debates concerning the virgin pregnancy are nowhere more vociferously
explored than in late-medieval religious drama. In the speech cited above,
the N-Town Joseph articulates the essential paradox at the heart of a drama
that is simultaneously domestic and spiritual. While he wants to think that
his meek and mild wife remains chaste, he believes her pregnancy to be
impossible without ‘mannys company’. But this is not only an appeal to the
laws of nature. It is also a question of religious understanding. The virgin
1 ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, in The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D8, ed. Stephen Spector,
EETS, s.s. 11–12, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 123–52, lines 105–7.
2 See the article in the Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/23/
bbc-nativity-drama-anti-jewish (accessed 2 January 2011) and Ruth Margolis’ review
in The Radio Times, 18 December 2010, p. 152.
147
Daisy Black
conception marks the beginning of a new kind of law – one that Joseph
is spectacularly ill-equipped to encounter. The argument between the holy
couple in plays depicting Joseph’s doubt is not therefore simply a debate
about spousal betrayal, sexual misdemeanour or a misogynistic exemplar of
the evils of taking a younger wife. It is a debate about time.
The Middle Ages supported several competing and intersecting models
of time. Within Church theology, time could be read as a linear narrative
of the Fall in Genesis, the life of Christ and progression towards Doomsday,
or it could be cyclical, with the Fall anticipating mankind’s eventual reunion
with God. Biblical events could also be experienced in the medieval present,
with worshippers directly participating in certain scriptural moments during
ceremonies such as the Mass, or through annual liturgical events such as the
Passion or Easter Sunday.3 There was therefore very little sense that biblical
time was distant or separate from medieval experiences of time. These models
worked alongside perceptions of divine or eternal time, as well as the secular
urban times experienced by the guilds producing and watching the mystery
plays.4 Medieval times have thus emerged as continually overlapping different
moments, enabling past and present to encounter and mingling secular and
sacred histories.5
Discussions of time in late-medieval theatre likewise acknowledge that
drama operates within several temporal models. Audiences encountering
the civic cyclical plays might have experienced a biblical narrative, often
not in chronological order, in which biblical past, present and future were
performed from Creation to Doomsday in a familiar space. These perfor-
mances promoted intersections between mercantile and religious times.
Static plays likewise not only transposed biblical narratives onto their medi-
eval performance spaces but were also themselves subject to those spaces’
own temporal demands.6 The treatment of time in the religious drama is
currently undergoing a period of critical revision as studies move away from
3 See Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Chicago, IL, 1980), p. 37; G. J. Whitrow, Time in History: Views of Time
from Prehistory to the Present Day (Oxford, 1989), pp. 71–86; and Carolyn Dinshaw,
How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time
(Durham, NC, 2012), p. 107.
4 Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (eds), Time and Eternity: The Medieval
Discourse (Turnhout, 2003) captures the diversity of medieval approaches to time in
a collection of studies.
5 See D. Vance Smith, ‘Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves’, New Literary History
28.2 (1997), 161–74 (p. 174).
6 See for example the Chester cycle’s adaptation under increasingly Protestant performance
contexts in Jessica Dell, David Klausner and Helen Ostovich (eds), The Chester Cycle
in Context, 1555–1575: Religion, Drama, and the Impact of Change (Farnham, 2012) and
Theresa Coletti, ‘The Chester Cycle in Sixteenth-Century Religious Culture’, Journal of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37.3 (2007), 531–47 (531).
148
Joseph, Time and Space in the N-Town Marian Plays
considering their temporality as being primarily linear with some anachro-
nistic elements, in favour of readings that support polychronic, typological
and topological models of time.7
Yet, in some places plays (and their biblical narratives) depend heavily
upon concepts of linearity. This chapter therefore investigates the preg-
nant woman and disbelieving husband of the N-Town manuscript through
reverting to a medieval reading of time which envisaged the birth of Christ
as part of a linear temporal process involving transition and supersession.
The couple debate a moment of change as Old and New theologies grapple
over Mary’s pregnant body.
The behaviour and belief structures of the N-Town Joseph and Mary are
consistent with two complementary theological approaches: the practice
of typological reading, and the belief in the supersession of one order by
another. Supersessionary models consist of a linear understanding of time
which views the past as either replaced, redefined or succeeded by the theolo-
gies or ideologies of the present.8 In medieval historiography, this hinged
upon a perceived division in time at the point of Christ: a theological transi-
tion which altered previous belief structures.9 As Kathleen Davis argues, the
Christian order is grounded ‘by attaching it, by way of the anno domini and
the biblical supersession of the New Testament over the Old Testament [...]
to a division in sacred time’.10 But in religious plays depicting the concep-
tion of Christ it is not entirely clear at what point this act of supersession
takes place or, consequently, what the religious statuses of the characters are.
As historical or biblical figures at the birth of the New Testament and well
before the Crucifixion and development of Christian Messianic law, they
cannot be called Christians. Yet, as late-medieval dramatic characters they
are informed and directed by the needs and preoccupations of a Christian
audience. The idea of Christ’s entry into time as constituting a theological
and temporal transition therefore leaves space for negotiation. The ‘new law’
7 For discussions of anachronism see V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi
(London, 1966), pp. 104–6. For readings of multiple temporal models operating in
medieval drama, see Isabel Davis, ‘“Ye that pasen by þe Weiye”: Time, Topology and the
Medieval Use of Lamentations 1.12’, Textual Practice 25.3 (2011), 437–72 and Elisabeth
Dutton, ‘Secular Medieval Drama’, The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in
English, ed. Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker (Oxford, 2010), pp. 384–94.
8 See Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (London, 1990), pp. 293–7
and Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History
(Philadelphia, PA, 2003).
9 For the historiographical consequences of Bede’s placing of Jesus at the centre of
Christian history, see Peter Manchester, ‘Time in Christianity’, in Religion and Time,
ed. Anindita Niyogi Balslev and J. N. Mohanty (Leiden, 1993), pp. 109–37.
10 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and
Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), p. 4.
149
Daisy Black
of Mary’s virginal pregnancy has not yet been consolidated, whilst the ‘old
law’ receives its first challenge. The result is Joseph’s Doubt.
These gendered experiences of the time of the Incarnation therefore
continue the debates outlined elsewhere in this book concerning the different
temporal rhythms experienced by men and women in the Middle Ages.
However, I first wish to depart from this reading by examining how, in the
Mary play of the N-Town manuscript, which covers the couple’s betrothal
and marriage, Joseph and Mary mutually experience a Christian depiction
of ‘Hebrew’ time.11 This is first expressed when both attempt to deny a linear,
procreative time-line by expressing their wishes to remain chaste: a desire
which is apparently incompatible with the temple’s edict that Mary must
marry. While in the Mary play the holy couple find themselves at odds with
the ‘Hebrew’ society in which they exist, the inserted Joseph’s Doubt pageant,
which depicts time after the Incarnation, suggests that their experiences of
time differ from one another.12 In her enquiry into gendered experiences
of time Luce Irigaray contends not only that femininity is experienced as a
space and masculinity conceived of in terms of time, but also that moments
of transition have the ability to fundamentally shift established relationships
between men and women:
The transition to a new age coincides with a change in the economy of desire,
necessitating a different relationship between man and god(s), man and man,
man and the world, man and woman.13
I argue that the conflict between the couple in Joseph’s Doubt expands Iriga-
ray’s model of gender roles at points of transition. When God is Incarnate in
the body of a woman, Mary contains both space and time. As a consequence,
the argument between Mary and Joseph is initially articulated through prob-
lems of space – spaces including the playing-spaces of the stage as well as
that of Mary’s bafflingly pregnant body. Yet this act of spatial negotiation is
equally about time, as the characters grapple with the complexities of their
own Christian/Hebrew time and the alternative ways this time provides for
reading, understanding and contextualizing Mary’s pregnancy.
Moreover, while this chapter acknowledges the medieval belief that the
Incarnation, with its ability to provoke transition, shifts relationships between
men and women, men and God, and even men and faith, questions neverthe-
less remain concerning the time that operated prior to this transition. I there-
fore also examine the role of memory and, more importantly, forgetting in this
11 See Peter Meredith’s argument that the N-Town manuscript is a scribal compilation
of distinct plays and pageants, including a coherent ‘Mary Play’. See Peter Meredith,
The Mary Play from the N-Town Manuscript (London, 1987), pp. 1–23.
12 On the insertion of the ‘Joseph’s Doubt’ and ‘Trial’ plays into the Mary Play materials,
see Meredith, The Mary Play, pp. 2–4.
13 Luce Irigaray, The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford, 1991), p. 167.
150
performance of a supersessionary narrative. It has been noted that medieval
supersessionary temporal models were often challenged by figures that proved
difficult to assimilate, particularly women and Jews, who acted as uncom-
fortable ‘residues’ of the past.14 Because of this, Joseph’s transition from one
state of belief to another does not rely on the remembrance and reworking of
past doctrines within the context of a ‘Christian’ future, as Mary’s typological
approach to her own body does. Instead, it requires his deliberate decision
to forsake – and apparently forget – all he has believed before. I argue that
Joseph’s retraction of his former words constitutes a need for a ‘break’ that
proves impossible within the multiple temporal demands of the narrative.
My decision to focus upon the N-Town manuscript with regard to models
of supersessionary time is based upon two features of East Anglian devo-
tional culture which inform the debate between Joseph and Mary. Fifteenth-
century East Anglia sustained a complex and often bewildering relationship
with the Virgin Mary. Home to the popular shrine of Our Lady at Walsin-
gham and supporting the highest density of churches dedicated to Mary
anywhere in England, East Anglia was a thriving locus of Marian devotion.
This placed specific emphasis upon the veneration of Mary’s virginal but
maternal body – a preoccupation which becomes evident in the arguments of
the disbelieving Joseph.15 Yet East Anglian devotion also supported a culture
of religious and political questioning. The region saw several accusations
of heresy coupled with treason, including the 1411 heresy trials of Norwich
and, a century later, the implication of the shrine itself in the Walsingham
Conspiracy.16 The manifestation of these disputes has already been explored
in relation to the N-Town manuscript, suggesting that the dramatization of
Mary and Joseph’s conflict articulated some of the concerns of its medieval
performance time.17
Furthermore, as often happened in places of Marian devotion, East Anglia
also sustained a particularly full history of anti-Semitic religious and political
14 Lisa Lampert calls these troublesome figures the ‘hermeneutical Jew and hermeneutical
Woman, whose residues stubbornly challenged the transformative Christian paradigm’.
Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia,
PA, 2004), p. 14.
15 The Walsingham shrine, with its relic of Mary’s milk, encouraged a devotion to the
Virgin Mary that was particularly concerned with the tangible. See J. A. Tasioulas,
‘Between Doctrine and Domesticity: The Portrayal of Mary in the N-Town Plays’, in
Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 222–45 (p.
223).
16 See C. E. Moreton, ‘The Walsingham Conspiracy of 1537’, Historical Research 63.150
(2007), 29–43.
17 See Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society
in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, IL, 1989) and Theresa Coletti, ‘Purity and Danger:
The Paradox of Mary’s Body and the En-gendering of the Infancy Narrative in the
English Mystery Cycles’, Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed.
Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia, PA, 1993), pp. 65–95 (p. 79).
151
Daisy Black
practice.18 Home of the rival twelfth-century cults of William of Norwich
and Robert of Bury, East Anglian tales of Jewish ritual child-murder insti-
gated devotional practices which survived through four centuries as well
as contributing towards violence against real Jews.19 Reproduced in East
Anglian book illumination, on church walls and in dramatic productions
(of which the late-fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament is the
most well known), narratives of Jewish doubt and malevolence against Chris-
tianity continued long after the expulsion of 1290. A reading of these plays
through dialogues concerned with the supersession of ‘Jewish’ or ‘Hebrew’
time through the ‘Christian’ space of Mary’s body is thus particularly loaded
within East Anglian performance contexts.20 Joseph and Mary’s struggle
between biblical ‘times’ is equally susceptible to the present and past times
of its probable performance space.
Depictions of Judaism in the mystery plays have usually been examined
in relation to characters who are either specifically named as Jews or other-
wise depicted as performing a ‘Jewish’ role by being antagonistic to Christ.
These characters (for example, Herod, Annas, Caiaphas and the Crucifixion
soldiers) perform according to an anti-Semitic stereotype which casts Jews
as rejecting Jesus’s divinity and opposing change.21 But these studies either
do not include characters that are ethnically Jewish or, where they do, briefly
identify them as doubting but open to conviction and as thus, essentially, not
Jewish. However, while such characters are not vociferous deniers of Christ,
they are nevertheless participants in a law that is not (yet) Christian. This
is particularly important in the N-Town plays preceding the Salutation and
Conception, where all characters, including Mary, are historically Jewish and
therefore following ‘Jewish’ law – though this is a representation of Judaism
constructed by Christian theology.
Even before Joseph encounters Mary’s impossibly pregnant body, doubt
is one of the defining characteristics of this performance of Judaism at the
18 On Mary’s relationship to anti-Semitism, see Merrall Llewelyn Price, ‘Re-membering

the Jews: Theatrical Violence in the N-Town Marian Plays’, Comparative Drama 41.4
(2007–8), 439–63 (p. 447) and Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late
Medieval Jews (Hong Kong, 1999), pp. 7–39.
19 The year 1190 saw the plunder and murder of Jewry at Lynn, the slaughter of Jews in
Norwich on Shrove Tuesday and the execution of fifty-seven Jews in Bury St Edmunds
on Palm Sunday. In the same year, Bury St Edmunds became the first town in England
to expel its Jews. See Joe Hillaby, ‘Jewish Colonisation in the Twelfth Century’, in Jews
in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia
Skinner (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 15–40 (p. 30).
20 My usage of ‘Jewish’ in inverted commas denotes where I refer to medieval projections
of Judaism – projections more influenced by anti-Semitical stereotypes than drawn
from encounters with real Jews or familiarity with Jewish theological practices.
21 See Stephen Spector, ‘Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays’, Comparative
Drama 13.1 (1979), 3–16 (6).
152
brink of Christian time. The Mary plays of the N-Town manuscript initially
present the holy couple as obedient to the religious laws of their commu-
nity. A temple virgin, the young Mary is well versed in the articles of her
faith, even if her recitation of the ‘fiftene psalmys’ is anachronistically filtered
through Catholic doctrine, especially concepts of confession, grace and good
deeds.22 Likewise, Joseph’s genealogy as a descendent of David acknowledges
a lineage invested in bringing together the biblical Hebrew race with the
theology of Jesus.23 The importance of Joseph’s genealogy, outlined in the
gospels of Matthew and Luke, places a specific emphasis on promoting conti-
nuity between Jesus, his ‘earthly’ father and the race of David that had gone
before.24 Patrick Geary has noted the popular marginalization of Joseph’s
genealogy and his status as a father figure throughout the Middle Ages,
and argues that the genealogies were increasingly seen as conflicting with
Mary’s status as Virgin mother.25 However, the N-Town Marriage is rela-
tively unusual in stressing the importance of Joseph’s genealogy alongside
Mary’s (the earlier episodes of the Mary play extend Mary’s genealogy back
to her apocryphal parents, Anna and Joachim). The emphasis upon Joseph’s
descent, and the flowering of his staff, itself an emblem of the Jesse Root of
Isaiah 11.1, suggests that The Marriage presents the Incarnation of Christ as
a continuation of the preceding laws, rather than a point of rupture.26 As
such, Joseph’s genealogy performs a more affirmative than disruptive role by
authorizing the time of Jesus.
However, this stressing of continuity through establishing connec-
tions between scriptural (and non-scriptural) times also has the
potential to trouble the present of the play. As the bishop’s speech
in The Marriage indicates, the bringing together of Hebrew and
Christian theologies presents a problem for the temple laws:
EPISCOPUS: Who xal expownd þis oute?

þe lawe doth after lyff of clennes;
þe lawe doth bydde such maydenes expres
22 See ‘The Presentation of Mary’, in The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D8, ed.
Stephen Spector, EETS, s.s. 11–12, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 81–94, lines 101–61.
23 ‘The Marriage of Mary and Joseph’, in The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D8, ed.
Stephen Spector, EETS, s.s. 11–12, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 95–111, line 160.
24 See Matthew 1. 1–16 and Luke 3. 23–38. Both gospels follow Joseph’s line, rather than
Mary’s. All bible quotations in this chapter come from the Douay-Rheims Bible at
http://www.drbo.org/ (accessed 29 May 2013).
25 See Patrick J. Geary, Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the
Virgin Mary (Princeton, NJ, 2006), p. 63.
26 See Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser (eds), Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the
Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 1–17 (p. 1): ‘The Tree of Jesse portrays Jesus Christ
as the present culmination of a generative past and as the future of which that past
spoke.’
153
Daisy Black
þat to spowsyng they xulde hem dres.
God help us in þis dowhte!27
Mary’s vow of chastity constitutes a seemingly insurmountable challenge to

the laws demanding her marriage. This contradiction of laws occurs because
they are drawn from both Hebrew and Christian scripture. Hebrew law,
unlike the Christian Pauline texts, advocated marriage and not chastity, so
the bishop’s question, while presented as part of Old Testament law, is actu-
ally part of a Christian debate.28 The Marriage is therefore complicated by the
fact that the play’s uncertain religious and temporal statuses mean that char-
acters engage with a baffling mixture of Hebrew and Christian traditions.29
Nevertheless, given that the temple and its laws are historically pre-Christian,
Mary’s reluctance to relinquish her virginal state prefigures her imminent role
as a bearer of a new religious law, even as it exposes the fragility of ‘Jewish’
laws. Furthermore, the bishop’s question, ‘who xall expownd þis oute?’ also
anticipates the arrival of a new law in Christ. Neither the bishop nor his
minister can answer this question, and instead they reiterate their unwilling-
ness to cross ‘law and custom’ or ‘Scrypture’.30 This suggests that their way of
reading scripture – which, the Introduction to this book suggests, involves a
text-based, ‘masculine’ approach to the past – becomes obsolete when they
attempt to legislate over Mary’s female body. They cling to the paradox of
texts which, within a biblical time-frame, are on the brink of being superseded
but which, in the time of the Christian society performing this depiction of
‘Jewish’ law, have already been superseded.31 Here, the holy couple are in the
same position in relation to their own time, and not, as Irigaray’s reading of
gendered time has suggested, in opposition. Rather, they trouble the time in
which their marriage is set by exposing the difference between two laws: one
which requires their marriage and another which advocates chastity.
If the couple’s desire for chastity initially promises to interrupt the bishop’s
promotion of the linear life-rhythm of marriage and the continuation of
Davidic genealogy, it concludes by reconciling this apparent discrepancy
in law. The bishop’s theological conundrum is resolved when both parties
in the union state that they wish to remain virgins, thus allowing for the
distinctly medieval Christian idea of a chaste marriage. Nevertheless, this
27 ‘The Marriage of Mary and Joseph’, lines 87–91.

28 See Cynthia Kraman, ‘Communities of Otherness in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale’, in
Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 138–54
(p. 145).
29 The temple authorities, named ‘Episcopus’ and ‘Minister’, also perform their equivalent
positions in the medieval Catholic Church.
31 This mitigates their ‘fault’ in failing to read Mary and Joseph’s situation as a prefiguration
of Christian doctrine, as Christ, for them, is utterly new.
154
does not obscure the fact that, even under these circumstances, Joseph
remains unwilling:
EPISCOPUS: Joseph, wole ȝe haue þis maydon to ȝoure wyff
And here honour and kepe as ȝe howe to do?
JOSEPH: Nay, sere, so mote I thryff!
I haue right no nede þerto!32
Although he eventually concedes to perform according to the will of God,

Joseph’s answering of his marital vows with the comically brusque ‘Nay sere,
so mote I thryff!’ sets a precedent of stubbornness which is evident in his
approach both to these ‘Hebrew’ laws and to those he will encounter in the
Christian mystery of the virgin pregnancy. Resistant to the assertion of either
authority, Joseph voices the instabilities inherent in both religions.
The Marriage thus presents Judaism as simultaneously on the brink of
supersession and both product and consolidator of later Christian theology.
It is therefore possible to argue that, while the characters believe they are
engaged in the linear performance of an established law, their audience
experiences this time as typological – a time in which glimpses of a Chris-
tian future may be identified (or, in this case, retrospectively placed) in the
Hebrew past. Furthermore, the fact that Mary and Joseph are obedient to
this older law reflects medieval Christianity’s own approach to the Old Testa-
ment. While arguing that new laws had superseded the old at the birth of
Christ, Christianity nevertheless relied upon Hebrew scripture for valida-
tion, demonstrating recognition even at the point of supersession.33 But the
characters in The Marriage do not possess their audience’s knowledge of a
different time. From their perspective, until the drama of the New Testament
unfolds, there is no other law.
In Joseph’s Doubt, a play inserted into the Mary plays of the N-Town manu-
script, the couple’s temporal perspectives are in opposition to one another.
Joseph’s confrontation with the visible evidence of his wife’s pregnancy thus
performs a meeting of different perspectives as the newly enlightened Mary
attempts to convince him of a new truth. This difference between the spouses
is initially consolidated through a polemic of age and youth. Joseph is an old
man throughout the N-Town manuscript. Indeed, age appears to be Joseph’s
defining characteristic, and becomes a unifying motif between the Mary plays
and the pageant matter of the compilation. Ten of Joseph’s sixteen speeches in
The Marriage mention his advanced age; in Joseph’s Doubt he blames his age
for the apparent infidelity of his wife; and his advanced years provide bawdy
material for the detractors of the later Trial pageant, even as they exonerate

33 Constructions of ‘Judaism’ primarily enabled Christian doubts about the virgin birth
to be addressed. See Steven Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in
Medieval Europe (Minneapolis, MN, 2006), p. xvii.
155
Daisy Black
Joseph from the possibility of fatherhood.34 Joseph’s aged body is the visual
opposite of Mary’s pregnant body and is of almost equal importance.
Approaches to dramatic depictions of the doubting Joseph have tended to
focus on the popular medieval literary trope of the ‘older man with a younger
wife’.35 The N-Town Joseph certainly reads himself within this textual tradi-
tion, and warns the old men in his audience against marrying younger
wives.36 However, I argue that the age discrepancy between the holy couple
equally engages with the transition between Judaism and Christianity that
their marriage dramatizes. Juxtapositions of Mary’s young, fertile body and
Joseph’s old, impotent and (initially) blind body reflect iconographic and
literary approaches which attempted to differentiate between the older Jewish
religion and its Christian successor. The visual decline in depictions of Jews
in medieval iconography was paralleled by depictions of an increasingly aged
Joseph. By the fifteenth century, Jews were depicted as disfigured stereotypes
placed in visual as well as physical opposition to the more regular features
of the ‘Christian’ figures they shared spaces with, while Joseph was usually
shown as an elderly man and placed in the background of compositions
featuring the holy family.37 Sylvia Tomasch notes that, in certain illustra-
tions of Joseph’s doubt, Joseph is shown with specifically ‘Jewish’ attributes
of bearing and clothing, which he then loses after his reconciliation with
Mary.38 This suggests that Joseph’s eventual belief in Mary was held to signify
his becoming a ‘Christian’. A reading of the N-Town Joseph’s visual charac-
terization as ‘Jewish’ therefore lends a broader meaning to the ‘old-man-with-
a-young-wife’ polemic. As a consequence, plays depicting Joseph’s doubt are
not static in their representation, but hinge upon Joseph’s ability to transition
from one state of belief to another. His journey of doubt, conviction and
conversion ends not in his defeat, but with Joseph confirmed in his role
as Mary’s partner and the human foster-father of Christ. The past is thus
retained and remembered, if altered through its assimilation into the new
law. In order for this to happen, Joseph must learn a new way of reading his
wife’s body as well as of confronting the belief-sets of his past.
Joseph’s encounter with Mary’s pregnant body in Joseph’s Doubt is enacted
as a negotiation of closed spaces. Returning from a ‘fer countre’, Joseph is
34 On the gradual decline of Joseph in iconography, see Geary, Women at the Beginning,
pp. 73–4.
35 See J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford,
1986), pp. 135–89 (p. 158) and B. A. Lakas, ‘Seniority and Mastery: The Politics of
Ageism in the Coventry Cycle’, Early Theatre 9.1 (2006), 15–36.
36 ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, lines 49–51.
37 See Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (London, 2009), pp.
358–60 and Debra Higgs-Strickland, Saracens, Demons, Jews: Making Monsters in
Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ, 2003), pp. 39–52.
38 Sylvia Tomasch, ‘Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew’, in Chaucer and the Jews:
Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. Sheila Delany (London, 2002), pp. 69–85.
156
confronted with a locked door and gains access to his wife only after much
shouting – thus hinting at the other female spaces from which Joseph has
been absent. From the play’s beginning, Joseph is therefore distanced both
spatially and temporally from Mary. His travels leave a period of absence
during which Mary has, in Joseph’s eyes, fundamentally changed. Time has
passed differently for the two characters. The Annunciation, and her accept-
ance of her role as the mother of God, operates as a continuation of Mary’s
engagement in the ‘Christian’ beliefs exhibited in the Mary play’s infancy and
Marriage episodes. But for Joseph, implicitly absent during the salutation and
now confronted with the early stages of Mary’s pregnancy, she has undergone
a transformation while he has stayed the same.
The consequence of these different experiences of the divine pregnancy
is a conflict of interpretation. As Joseph responds to the changes in his
wife’s body, Mary reconfigures Joseph’s observations to reflect their signifi-
cance within the later Christian narrative. This process begins when Joseph
observes the glow of the pregnant Mary:
JOSEPH: Me merveylyth, wyff, surely! ȝoure face I cannot se
But as þe sonne with his bemys quan he is mosy bryth.
MARIA: Housbonde, it is as it plesyth oure Lord, þat grace of hym grew.
Who þat evyr beholdyth me, veryly,
They xal be grettly steryd to vertu.39
While observing the physical changes in his wife, Joseph unconsciously hints
at the spiritual nature of Mary’s condition. His description of her bright-
ness signifies both the physical glow of pregnancy and the fact that she now
carries the Incarnation of a god – a god whose status as ‘sonne’ is hinted
at by Joseph’s unwitting pun. Moreover, Joseph’s speech may also be read
as prefiguring a later moment in Christian time in which the divine and
human meet. Joseph’s inability to see Mary’s bright face looks forward to
the transfiguration of Christ in Luke 9.28–36: ‘And whilst he prayed, the
shape of his countenance was altered, and his raiment became white and
glittering. And behold two men were talking with him. And they were Moses
and Elias.’40 This meeting between Christ and the Old Testament prophets is
one of the gospel of Luke’s central demonstrations of continuance between
the Old and New Testaments. Joseph’s speech unconsciously transposes this
meeting of Hebrew and Christian authorities into his present encounter with
Mary. Mary’s reply is likewise secured within the Christian time her preg-
nancy signifies, and redefines the changes in her body within the context
of the salvation narrative. Acknowledging her new status as the mother of
God, Mary recalls the power of Marian iconography to inspire its viewers to

40 Luke 9.28–31.
157
Daisy Black
virtuous behaviour, whilst aligning her time with a theology that recognizes
the concept of ‘grace’.41 Even before Joseph has noticed that Mary is pregnant,
the couple’s encounter has been framed by processes of literal interpretation
and Christian re-interpretation.
When he does notice Mary’s changed shape, Joseph’s reaction focuses
heavily on what is material and visible:
JOSEPH: That semyth evyl, I am afrayd.
þi wombe to hyȝe doth stonde!
I drede me sore I am betrayd.
Sum other man þe had in honde
Hens sythe þat I went!
Thy wombe is gret, it gynnyth to rise.
Than hast þu begownne a synfull gyse.42
Joseph’s ‘reading’ of Mary’s body and the infidelity he believes it signifies

instigates a dialogue in which Joseph repeatedly asks for the name of the
child’s father, only to be told it is God’s child – and his. But, for Joseph,
Mary’s body is corporeal proof of her sinful behaviour. He validates this
interpretation due to the fact that there has been no precedent for the virgin
pregnancy. As he says in exasperation, ‘God dede nevyr jape so with may.’43
Joseph’s reaction is understandable, because, in every case but Mary’s, such
a literal reading would be valid.
Joseph’s literal reading of Mary’s body consolidates his role as a character
treading the waters between different approaches to faith. With its emphasis
upon belief in the unseen (particularly regarding transubstantiation and the
virgin birth), medieval doctrine taught that while physical appearances might
convey one message, an accompanying act of faith was required to under-
stand a thing’s spiritual significance.44 It also claimed that ‘Jewish’ scriptural
traditions were limited to literal and carnal ways of reading. As Jews were
frequently depicted as interpreting Mary as adulterous, medieval Christians
turned this accusation back upon its imagined instigators and represented
Jewish scriptural traditions as carnal and backwards looking.45 This accusa-
tion of carnality is nowhere more evident than in texts in which the Virgin
Mary appears. From the Jewish–Christian debates of the twelfth centuries,
Mary’s virginal pregnancy was increasingly held to herald a religious transi-
tion between the Jewish laws of the Old Testament and the Christian laws
41 See James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2, 1350–1547: Reform and
Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002), pp. 383–457.
43 ‘Joseph’s Doubt’, line 44.
44 See Rubin, Gentile Tales, pp. 170–188.
45 See Kruger, The Spectral Jew, p. 171 and Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The
Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY, 1982), pp. 19–32.
158
of the New Testament.46 Belief in the Virgin birth of Christ became a funda-
mental signifier of Christian belief.
The N-Town Joseph therefore conducts a ‘Jewish’ reading of Mary’s body
by understanding her pregnancy as evidence of sin, rather than of spiritual
grace. Much of the play’s humour derives from the fact that most medi-
eval men would read the situation in the same way – so, Joseph’s response
to Mary’s body participates in both medieval and pre-Christian times. This
puts Joseph in an impossible position. His retention of the laws which
constitute his experience of the present ensures that he can read his wife’s
body in only one way. But Mary commands a different understanding – one
which paradoxically depends on both the supersession and the authority of
Joseph’s laws.47 Mary is able to read her own female body typologically. As
the embodiment of the Hebrew text Isaiah 7.14, which was held to prefigure
the virgin birth of Christ, Mary conducts a reading of her own time which
approaches the Old Law not as a contradiction but as a verification of her
new status.48 Privy to knowledge that Joseph does not have, Mary can there-
fore ‘read’ herself, and her time, differently.
Based upon the need to accommodate a ‘Jewish’ history within the
Christian faith narrative, typological reading is an important constituent of
supersessionary models of time. Kathleen Biddick explains:
Early Christians straightened out the unfolding of temporality (with its gaps
and vicissitudes) into a theological timeline […] based on two distinct but
related notions. First, they posited a present (‘this is now’) exclusively as a
Christian present. They cut off a Jewish ‘that was then’ from a Christian ‘this
is now.’49
Mary’s active engagement in the typological ‘reading’ of her own body trou-
bles the idea that women primarily provided the raw material which was
then interpreted by a man.50 Enclosing the makings of a new law within the
space of her female body, but also demonstrating her own understanding
of that law, the pregnant Mary disrupts the gendering of historical time as
46 See Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in Dispute (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 123–37
and James Simpson’s argument that Mary acts as a ‘mediatrix between one historical
dispensation and another’ in ‘The Rule of Medieval Imagination’, in Images, Idolatry
and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy
Dimmock, James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford, 2002), pp. 4–24 (p. 19).
47 Gavin Langmuir calls this the ‘birth trauma’ of medieval Christianity. See Langmuir,
History, Religion, and Antisemitism, p. 282.
48 Isaiah 7.14: ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son.’ This is consistent with
iconographical depictions of the young Mary at the Annunciation, where she is often
shown reading the book of Isaiah.
49 Biddick, The Typological Imaginary, p. 1.
50 See Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200 (Toronto,
1999), p. 15.
159
Daisy Black
masculine. She also proves able to provide a reading of herself and of the
change she signifies and, here, the woman’s reading that commands authority.
Not only is Joseph’s reading of her shown to be erroneous, but when he is
finally convinced, his former reading is actively cut away from Mary’s own
reading of herself within the Christian tradition. The moments of ‘cutting
off ’ necessary to the model of supersessionary transition in the Joseph’s Doubt
pageant are thus shown to be reliant on bodily space and physical distance.
Because of this, the play operates through a series of spatial exclusions: first,
Joseph’s voluntary exclusion from his wife’s body; second, his exclusion from
her house; and third, his exclusion from Mary’s presence until he is able to
learn a new way of ‘reading’ her.
This learning relies both upon the typological reworking of the Hebrew
scripture that informs Mary’s understanding of her place in the history
of salvation and upon Joseph’s will to forget his former, erroneous belief.
Joseph’s retention of superseded knowledge initially precludes new learning.
He hears his wife’s argument, but does not understand what she means. Mary
prays that her husband will be enlightened: ‘For vnknowlage he is deseysyd’,
but I would contend that Joseph’s ‘ailment’ is not so much ‘vnknowlage’ as
a conflicting kind of knowledge which he must either forget or refashion in
order to learn anew.51
This transition from a literal to a spiritual understanding of Mary’s body
results in Joseph’s becoming the first ‘convert’ to Christian belief when he
finally concedes the ‘truth’ of Christ’s virgin birth. In doing so, Joseph navi-
gates his ambiguous temporal position by becoming the first to believe Mary
and, after his wife, the second human to partake in New Testament time. The
staging of this transition bears some similarities to medieval literary accounts
of the Christian ‘conversion’ of Jewish figures.52 A miraculous occurrence
– in this case, the appearance of an angel – contradicts Joseph’s previous,
erroneous belief by informing him that Mary remains pure. Once Joseph
has stopped weeping and listens to the angel, his conviction is instant. His
language then resembles that of the Christian penitent, as Joseph retracts and
condemns his previous words on his return to Mary:
A mercy, mercy, my jentyl make,
Mercy, I haue sayd al amys!
All þat I haue sayd, here I forsake.53

52 See Robert C. Stacey, ‘The Conversion of the Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth-
Century England’, Speculum 67 (1992), 263–83 and the conversion narrative exemplum
in Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval
Sermon Stories (Albany, NY, 1997), pp. 203–33.
160
Joseph’s speech not only acknowledges Mary’s later role as a merciful inter-
cessor, but also attempts to forsake, or forget, his ‘Jewish’ past.54
While memory has been a great focus of the past decade (and, indeed,
of this volume), less attention has been paid to the role of forgetting. Mary
Carruthers’ memory studies interrogate medieval techniques for memo-
rizing, but spend less time on the art of forgetting – principally because, in
the monastic texts she works with, forgetting is an undesirable and involun-
tary action, to be combated through rigorous mental training.55 Neverthe-
less, she does indicate that wilful forgetting during the process of conversion
was thought to be incredibly difficult. Forgetting, or ‘purging’ memories of a
previous state of belief, does not rely upon a negation or obliteration of what
has passed but, rather, on a transformation of memories.56 If the past is never
truly forsaken – as Joseph attempts to effect here – but, instead, transformed
and assimilated, then this suggests congruence between practices of typology,
remembrance and forgetting. Joseph’s denunciation of his previous accusa-
tions therefore suggests that, while he recognizes his wife’s truth, he never-
theless continues to experience time somewhat differently to her. Unlike
Mary, he cannot at this point assimilate his past beliefs into his present, and
instead wishes to cut past and present asunder. He will therefore never be
able to read resonances of the Transfiguration or of virtue-inspiring Marian
iconographical traditions into the glow of Mary’s pregnancy. Mary, on the
other hand, refashions the past in the service of the present – a practice
for which the conversion and re-assimilation of her irascible and doubting
husband provide a memorable exemplar.
Joseph’s participation in the first transition between ‘Jewish’ and ‘Christian’
beliefs not only reinstates Mary from a figure of doubt to a figure of devotion
but also restores Joseph’s role as adoptive father to the unborn Christ. Never-
theless, the play does not provide a permanent solution for the gendered
or temporal problems raised by the couple’s argument. The supersession-
based time depicted here enacts one performance of linear theological tran-
sition, but ‘Christian’ time continues to be open to challenge throughout
the collated plays of the N-Town manuscript. Mary’s body comes under the
scrutiny of detractors, midwives and, again, Joseph, when he voices his reser-
54 See Kruger, The Spectral Jew, p. 17: ‘The Jew remains a spectre that must be put to rest.’
55 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study in Medieval Culture (Cambridge,
1990), pp. 75–7 and Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the
Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 155–68.
56 See Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of
Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 95–8 (p. 97). See also Wim Verbaal, ‘Bernard
of Clairvaux’s School of Oblivion’, in Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages,
ed. Mette B. Bruun and Stephanie Glaser (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 221–37, who identifies
a spiritual longing to be free of the past in Bernard of Clairvaux’s advice that new
monks should cultivate forgetfulness.
161
Daisy Black
vations concerning his wife’s apparently unnecessary Purification.57 While
this chapter has demonstrated what happens when two characters approach a
problem from different temporal perspectives, performing a moment of theo-
logical transition demands multiple negotiations of times, spaces, genders
and memories. These negotiations must be performed repeatedly in order to
secure such transition, as the Christological narrative at the core of superses-
sionary theory neither fully replaces nor assimilates previous laws. Acts of
succession are thus rarely ‘clean’, producing performances that are simultane-
ously medieval, biblical, set within scriptural chronologies and universally
timeless.
57 See Coletti, ‘Purity and Danger’, p. 74, which claims that Mary’s obedience to the
Jewish rite of Purification stresses her retention of the Jewish laws even as her ‘sinless’
pregnancy renders them obsolete.
162
10
Dismembering Gender and Age: Replication,

Rebirth and Remembering in The Phoenix
William Rogers
T he Anglo-Saxon literary record presents an excellent opportunity to

interrogate and utilize modern feminist theory, while simultaneously
paying heed to the early-medieval context of that literary production. The
often-spectral presence of women in the poetic, legal and social record
presents obvious comparisons to late-twentieth-century critical theories with
respect to the social and linguistic construction of ‘woman’. Indeed, much
Old English literature has proven useful to readings that focus on gender,
sex and sexuality, and the role and place of women.1 While female figures are
everywhere in the corpus of extant Old English poetry, the hazy or incom-
plete presence of the female figure makes readings of gender especially diffi-
cult.2 If read differently, however, the haunting presence of the almost-erased
woman can be productive, as Elizabeth Cox has demonstrated in her essay
on Beowulf’s women in this present volume and as I argue here in a new
reading of the Old English Phoenix.3 A reworking of at least three versions
of the Latin physiologus of the phoenix, the poem offers a nuanced view of
age and time, troubles the traditional link between age and wisdom that is
found in several places within the extant Old English corpus, and follows its
1 For an explicit genealogy of scholars using feminist theory in Anglo-Saxon literature,

see Mary Dockray-Miller, ‘Old English Literature and Feminist Theory: A State of
the Field’, Literature Compass 5 (2008), 1049–59. Most recently, see Stacy S. Klein,
‘Gender’, Carol Braun Pasternack, ‘Sex and Sexuality’, and Helene Scheck, ‘Women’,
in A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, ed. Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée R. Trilling
(London, 2012), pp. 39–54, pp. 181–96 and pp. 265–79, respectively.
2 To see how Old English literature can become the site of productive inquiry in
terms of gender and memory, see Lisabeth C. Buchelt, ‘All About Eve: Memory and
Re-Collection in Junius 11’s Epic Poems Genesis and Christ and Satan’, in Women and
Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity, ed. Sara S. Poor and
Jana K. Schulman (New York, 2007), pp. 137–58.
3 See Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture
in Anglo-Saxon England (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), p. 1, for their view that ‘women are
present, but we are everywhere faced with their absence from the cultural record’.
163
William Rogers
source traditions partially in seeing the bird as either neuter or female, before
settling on a masculine gender.4
In light of this palimpsest of gender, I pinpoint the spectral role of the
phoenix’s female sex in the Old English Phoenix and discuss that formulation
within the poem’s construction of time, memory and old age. Old age is an
appropriate theme through which the poem’s manoeuvrings on gender may
be interrogated, as the construction of old age in the poem suggests both a
masculinizing scheme of time and lifespan, and a non-linear view of years
that challenges this masculine telos. As a reflection not only on linear time
but also on cyclical rhythms of time in the poem, this unusual depiction of
old age allows both for the end of the phoenix’s life and for its renewed youth,
with no interruption in wisdom or knowledge. The Phoenix presents, without
resolution, opposing views of time, gender and age which the Phoenix poet
attempts to synthesize, an effort reflected through the role of memory and
knowledge through time in the poem. Similarly, Luce Irigaray’s portrayal
of gender difference offers a postmodern conceptualization of the phoenix’s
ever-changing age and gender, even as the poem provides something of a
premodern critique of any notion of sexual difference. Through examination
of the phoenix as an exemplary figure, I trace how the poem creates age and
gender as indeterminate characteristics through the deployment of a locus
amoenus, where seasonal difference, age difference and gender difference all
seem to be banished.
Banished, however, they are not. Indeed, the poem troubles its own
description of sameness with levels of difference that crystallize around
descriptions of age, gender and apparently sexless replication. From the poet’s
depiction of the bird and its age in a location where old age does not exist,
to the confusion of the phoenix’s ‘real’ gender as given by the poet, many
facts about the bird are hazy. The poem, however, seeks to counteract these
points where traditional knowledge fails or falters. By reinforcing a tradi-
tional, masculine hierarchy of knowledge through repeated invocations of a
traditional textual authority – such as Lactantius’s Carmen de Ave Phoenice,
where the bird is grammatically gendered female – the poet attempts to paper
over these indeterminate characteristics of the mythical bird.5 This source,
however, far from making concrete what is known, instead presents the Old
English poet with another point of confusion, one which he seems both to
forget and then to remember. The phoenix, as a model of sameness, rather
4 For translations of three versions of the Phoenix myth which are considered to have
been certain sources for the Phoenix poet, see Sources and Analogues of Old English
Poetry, trans. Michael J. B. Allen and Daniel G. Calder (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 113–20.
5 For a discussion of the bird’s sex in various source materials, see R. Van den Broek,
The Myth of the Phoenix According to Classical and Early Traditions (Leiden, 1972), pp.
357–89. Van den Broek catalogues the various materials that position the Phoenix as
male, female and, confusingly, bisexual, by which he means two-sexed.
164
Replication, Rebirth and Remembering in The Phoenix
becomes a site where we can read how age and gender might be created and
remembered differently.
The break-down of the bird’s apparent sameness, seemingly maintained
through its life-cycle eternally, reinforces that the tracing of difference can
be a productive strategy with this poem. Likewise, this has been recognized
by Irigaray in her conception of sexual difference and its effect on time and
memory, something that has been used fruitfully in other studies of medi-
eval culture and literature.6 Indeed, as a critic in conversation both with
premodern texts and contemporary and near-contemporary theorists such as
Martin Heidegger, it is unsurprising that Irigaray would have some purchase
on the discussion of time and space. This foregrounding of temporality as a
concern in her An Ethics of Sexual Difference (as discussed by McAvoy in her
Introduction to this book) makes her comments on the interactions between
sex and temporality particularly useful for medievalist inquiry, which often
makes central ideas of temporality and periodization.7
Ethics begins appropriately with a nod to an implicit periodization of
western culture, demarcated by philosophical inquiry. Sexual difference,
according to Irigaray, ‘is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue,
of our age’.8 This emphasis on theory in time suggests the utility of Irigaray’s
formulation of immanent and imminent sexual difference to discussions of
biological and cultural formations of sexual difference through time. Reading
The Phoenix through Irigaray does not, however, create a monolithic picture
of sexual difference or demonstrate its transhistorical appearance. Indeed,
The Phoenix disrupts both normative sex and normative time. Rather than
merely anticipate Irigaray’s linking of sexual difference with space and time,
‘where the feminine is experienced as space, but often with connotations
of the abyss and night (God being space and light?), while the masculine
is experienced as time’, the poem disrupts this linking of sexual difference
and space and time.9 As we shall see, time is linked to space through the
phoenix, as its old age prompts a physical journey for material renewal, a
union reflected in the momentary disappearance of sexual difference in the
Phoenix poet’s description of the bird. Precisely because Irigaray posits the
normative experience of time as masculine, her work on the ethics of sexual
6 Amy Hollywood, ‘“That Glorious Slit”: Irigaray and the Medieval Devotion to Christ’s
Side Wound’, in Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture: Thresholds of History, ed. Theresa
Krier and Elizabeth D. Harvey (London, 2004), pp. 105–25. For Hollywood’s discussion
of Angela of Foligno, refer to pp. 105–9, and see pp. 120–1 for her examination of Judith
Butler’s reappraisal of Irigaray’s ‘eros of surfaces’.
7 In fact, Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing present an overarching paradigm of
periodization as partially responsible for the continuing erasure of female agency from
the cultural record in their Double Agents, pp. 4–6.
8 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill
(Ithaca, NY, 1984), p. 5.
165
William Rogers
difference holds promise for highlighting how gender, memory and time
function differently in The Phoenix. For, indeed, it is obvious that the phoenix
experiences time uniquely: old age is a simple stop in a cyclical notion of
years which repeat endlessly – until the end of days – and the Phoenix poet
suggests that this portrait of the life-cycle is an allegory for the figure of Jesus
and/or the faithful of the Church.
These attempted allegories and their varying level of success in explaining
the phoenix’s odd life highlight the usefulness of Irigaray’s approach, which
allows a re-reading of the poet’s own revisions of his source material. As I
offer below in my discussion of memory, a certain form of textual memory is
both valorized and troubled by the poet’s remembering and forced forgetting.
As a poem, The Phoenix dramatizes multiple levels of memory and forget-
ting. It begins with ‘Hæbbe ic gefrugnen’ [I have heard], a verbal phrase that
implies a sense of knowing and process of memory (and remembering).10
Oral or written, this knowledge of the phoenix and its mythical land is
something remembered for this particular poem.11 The Phoenix recreates the
physiologus tradition of the mythical bird and reworks sections of the bird’s
allegorical tradition to make room for explicitly Christian understandings.
This recasting serves to stress tenuously given readings of the bird’s signifi-
cance.
That the poem begins with memory is no accident. Indeed, memory is
central to the identity of the bird: it must remember the process for change
into youth, and, though its body ages, the phoenix’s memory seemingly
escapes any decay. Beyond its own memory, versions of the bird in history
speak to a material and textual memory that stretches back to the Roman
Empire. The Old English poem is neither the first nor the last to depict
the mythological bird, as mentioned, and the recurring appearance of the
phoenix in classical to Renaissance texts reflects the eternal nature of the
phoenix itself, ever reborn and rewritten. Briefly tracing ancient ideas about
the phoenix, I attend first to this latter sense of memory and then discuss
the locus amoenus occupied by the phoenix.12
10 ‘The Phoenix’, in The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, ed. Bernard J. Muir, vol. 1
of 2 (Exeter, 1994), line 1. All subsequent citations of The Phoenix refer to this edition
by line number.
11 For a short discussion of the role of memory in oral- and written-centred societies,
see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
(Cambridge, 1990), p. 16.
12 The idea of the locus amoenus in The Phoenix is the subject of Jacek Olesiejko’s ‘The
Anglo-Saxon idea of locus amoenus: The Paradise in the Old English Judgement Day
II and The Phoenix’, in Thise Stories Beren Witnesse: The Landscape of the Afterlife in
Medieval and Post-Medieval Imagination, ed. Liliana Sikorska (Frankfurt, 2010), pp.
101–8. Compare also Catherine A. M. Clarke’s idea of England as edenic island in
Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England (Cambridge, 2006), esp. pp. 41–4, where
Clarke discusses the applicability of the term locus amoenus to The Phoenix.
166
Beryl Rowland has traced the outline of the phoenix’s textual journey in
her examination of bird symbolism, Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to
Bird Symbolism, where she describes the connections Christian texts make
between the phoenix and facets of Christian belief and allegory, including
‘the resurrection, immortality, the mystery of the Trinity, the birth of Christ,
or the penitent sinner’.13 All these aspects of Christian faith are supported
by a reading of The Phoenix as the poet switches from expansion of one
allegory to the next. Rowland’s emphasis, however, is not pointed squarely
to the Old English poem, and in her sole mention of The Phoenix, Rowland
contends that an ‘eighth-century Anglo Saxon poet created an elaborate alle-
gory in which the phoenix symbolized not only the risen Christ but the
chaste monastic recluse reaching the heavenly kingdom through a purifying
fire’.14 Elaborate allegory though it is, Rowland chooses to move on, and the
poem lacks even a direct quotation.
While The Phoenix gets short shrift in her study, Rowland’s emphasis on
the phoenix as emblem and blazon in the later Middle Ages and into the
Renaissance indirectly posits the mnemonic value of the bird. It is a small
leap to read Rowland’s study and connect that to Mary Carruthers’ study
of memory in the Middle Ages. While Carruthers’ study largely examines
Latin writings in the Anglo-Saxon period, her conjectures on the role of
bestiaries in creating and sustaining memory connect this discussion of the
phoenix with Rowland’s examination of the emblematic phoenix. According
to Carruthers, the bestiary, supposedly originating from the Latin physiologus
tradition and taught as part of a medieval education:
was not ‘natural history’ or moralized instruction (all instruction of the Middle
Ages was moralized) but mental imagining, the systemic forming of ‘pictures’
that would stick in the memory and could be used, like rebuses, homophonies,
imagines rerum, and other sorts of notae, to mark information within the grid.15
Anticipating Carruthers’ observations on possible uses of bestiaries in the

twelfth century, The Phoenix serves as reminder of the physiologus’s function
as mnemonic tool and larger symbol to remember, know and recite essen-
tial Christian belief. Indeed, within the poem, the allegory of the phoenix
is variously expanded by the poet to demonstrate connections between
aspects of Christian doctrine and the allegory of the eternal bird. Fore-
grounding memory and its ties to the phoenix, the poem uses the mythical
bird to increase the perseverance of the faithful as sight of the bird becomes
entwined with salvation in the poem’s rendering of the rapture. The righteous
13 Beryl Rowland, Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Knoxville, TN,
1978), p. 136.
14 Rowland, Birds with Human Souls, p. 136.
167
William Rogers
will know their worth as they see the ‘fugles tacen’ (sign of the bird) (510b),
while the Lord ‘ban gegædrað/ leomu lic somod, ond liges gæst’ (gathers
bone, limbs, body together and life’s spirit) (512b–513).
More than simply a reminder of faith, however, in the poem the bird
becomes a living embodiment of the desire to immortalize the wonder of
the phoenix’s life-cycle by means of craft as a carved or worked image in
metal, jewels or stones.16 Hilary Fox writes: ‘in “crafting” the phoenix, the
poet crafts an aesthetics of resurrection, which incorporates into the poet’s
eschatological vision the relationship between God as artifex/aurifex and the
human being as the object he creates and perfects’.17 Indeed, as I demonstrate,
the phoenix maps onto resurrection problematically as a metaphor, but the
notion of craftedness, which Fox details, comes alive for the Phoenix poet
when he discusses the memorial aspects of the phoenix halfway through the
poem. After the poet describes the newly rejuvenated bird, it is likened to a
gem, worked into gold: ‘smiþa orþoncum biseted weorþeð’ (by the skill of
the smith it becomes set) (304). Within a few lines, however, the poet makes
more obvious the tie between memorialization in writing and craft and the
literal, physical beauty of the phoenix:
Ðonne wundriað weras ofer eorþan
wlite and wæstma and gewritu cyþað
mundum mearciað on marmstan (lines 331–3)
(Then mankind wonders at the growth and countenance [of the phoenix],
which their writings make known, and they mark out with their hands on
marble stone.)
The second reference explicitly ties this material making of the phoenix with
the textual creations which reflect the paradisiacal physiologus. According to
Fox, part of the poet’s ‘innovation’ is the crafting of the phoenix – picking up
on the descriptions provided by Lactantius and refashioning them ‘with the
craft of the smith’.18 As he describes previous attempts to create representa-
tions of the bird, this desire to memorialize reflects back on the poet’s own
creation, the layers of which reinforce the similarity between the phoenix
and poetic craft.
Attesting to the source material’s reworking and refashioning into Old
English, the phoenix becomes a literal symbol of work, a fitting image for
a poem that appears almost as an intermediate draft, with a few different
explanations for the mythical bird’s life-cycle existing one atop the other.
16 For a helpful account of the meaning of craft in The Phoenix, see Hilary E. Fox, ‘The
Aesthetics of Resurrection: Goldwork, the Soul, and the Deus Aurifex in The Phoenix’,
Review of English Studies 63 (2011), 1–19.
17 Fox, ‘The Aesthetics of Resurrection’, p. 2.
18 Fox, ‘The Aesthetics of Resurrection’, p. 5.
168
This layering effect also implicitly links the crafted qualities of the phoenix
with its more paradisiacal properties, including its home, the locus amoenus.
While it is not at all obvious that the meaning of work and craft fits with
the phoenix’s other characteristics of perfection – because work and toil are
specifically excluded from the phoenix’s abode – the notion of craft is enliv-
ened by the phoenix’s own activities outside the locus amoenus, where it
is reborn. Gathering its ashes, the phoenix does the work of the Christian
faithful, gathering the remnants of its old body and creating a reliquary for
its relics. Insisting upon the phoenix-as-memorial-object reflects the poem’s
insistence on memory, one which is shared by other Old English poems, as
Cox has again demonstrated in the context of Beowulf.
For example, Genesis A and B have necessarily been the subject of inves-
tigations of the workings of memory, for, indeed, their descriptions of Eden,
a locus amoenus par excellence, emphasize both the absence of paradise and
humanity’s loss of this ideal place. In this context Lisabeth Buchelt’s recent
work on the role of memory and gender in the Junius 11 manuscript demon-
strates the centrality of memory in discussions of gender, writing and orality.
Buchlet insists upon a reading of Junius 11 that treats the manuscript as
a unified text, one which maintains a strong connection between the two
Genesis poems.19 Using Carruthers’ conception of medieval memory, Buchelt
asserts: ‘[p]ieces of stories are bits of associated ideas gathered together as a
reader dynamically interacts with the text in front of him through the art of
memoria, and are reassembled into a new, interpretative text by the reader
and audience.’20 The recreation of memory into new texts seems entirely
descriptive of how the Phoenix poet recreates and refashions, seemingly from
other textual – written and oral – memories, the experience of the locus
amoenus for the phoenix. Buchelt’s view of Junius 11, and of Eve as ‘model for
proper lectio divina’ and correct deployment of ‘the techniques of memoria
and inventio’, is clarifying here, as Buchelt explains that the basis for lectio
divina is both mental and muscular memory.21 The phoenix, like Eve and
the monastic figures who practise this embodied reading and remembering,
reads its own body, finding eternally the correct order of actions to be taken
in its old age.
The turn to Eve, however brief, foregrounds the idea of Eden, hopelessly
tied to and interconnected with the vision of the locus amoenus. As Clarke
has clearly shown, the depiction of an Edenic island, far from the changing
of seasons (with the inevitability of winter) found in The Phoenix, recalls an
already established tradition of locus amoenus and an enduring leitmotif in
English literature of the Edenic island.22 In lines 20–9 and 50–9, the poet
19 Buchelt, ‘All About Eve’, p. 141.

20 Buchelt, ‘All About Eve’, p. 138.
21 Buchelt, ‘All About Eve’, pp. 154–5.
22 Clarke, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, pp. 41–4.
169
William Rogers
describes this home as devoid of almost every imaginable negative, both
those which affect people and those that lay waste to the natural world. In
addition, in lines 50–9 the number of terrible outcomes is described:
nis þær on þam londe lað geniðla
ne wop ne wracu wea-tacen nan
yldu ne yrmðu ne se enga deað
ne lifes lyre ne laþes cyme
ne synn ne sacu ne sar wracu
ne wædle gewin ne welan onsyn
ne sorg ne slæp ne swar leger
ne winter-geweorp ne wedra gebregd
hreoh under heofonum ne se hearda forst
caldum cyle-gicelum cnyseð ænigne. (lines 50–9)
(In that land, there is no unpleasant enemy, nor lamentation or exile, no
sign of grief, old age or poverty; nor is there any death, nor loss of life,
no coming of evil, neither sin nor war, no pain of exile, neither strife of
poverty nor lack of wealth; neither sorrow nor sleep or grievous illness,
neither winter darts, tossed by tempests, rough under the heavens, nor the
hard frost, frozen with icicles, strike anyone.)
In this passage, the description of the locus amoenus is given in negative

terms. The poet does not convey what paradise is, but what it is not, essen-
tially creating a paradise free of evils that could be characterized as either
natural or socially constructed. From old age and death to exile and war,
the poet describes conditions of pain and toil that are created not only by
mankind’s fallen nature but also by human agency. The kernel of a negative
condition which is both a product of essentialism and social construction
thus carries productive connections for the study of gender and old age in
the poem, which also is created by biology and society. Further, as the poet
dismembers, literally, the negatives of human experience and biology, the
knowledge of paradise, through recitation of negative qualities, suggests a
premodern conception of memory. In almost an inverse of what Carruthers
has argued about medieval memory, the Phoenix poet uses images not to
build up an idea but, rather, to pull one apart: by dissecting the human
existence which the phoenix does not experience, the poet explicitly demon-
strates paradise. Clarke notes that ‘the circling of the text around recurrent
words and images contributes to the impression of the eternal, unchanging
nature of the locus amoenus’.23 This circularity also should be read further
as an evocation of the life-cycle – birth ceding to death and rebirth – and
its connotations of feminine agency and importance. Even in the midst of
paradise, the poet’s craft cannot forget the conditions of human life: ageing,
and the necessary components of birth.
23 Clarke, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, p. 44.
170
This biological imagery, which is essential to the poem, has been studied
at length. In this context Carol Falvo Heffernan’s The Phoenix at the Foun-
dation: Images of Women and Eternity in Lanctantius’s Carmen de Ave Phoe-
nice and the Old English Phoenix offers a reading that uncovers language
recalling cycles of conception, birth and menstruation by utilizing anthropo-
logical knowledge and techniques, and pinpointing numerological evidence.
Departing from Heffernan’s own conclusions, I continue to read time, age
and memory within a context of gender difference which nevertheless builds
naturally upon her catalogue of gynaecological imagery within the poem.
Her approach to this belief system undergirding both texts suggests further
how memory operates within The Phoenix, while at the same time carrying
implications for the appearance of gender within the Old English poem.
In defence of her use of ‘female initiation rites and early scientific theories
connected with menstruation, conception, and birth’, Heffernan invokes what
Lactantius himself might remember from his own upbringing in Africa to
suggest ties between Old English literature and fertility rites.24 Her rationale
for including anthropological evidence of ‘traditional religions’ is implicitly
that Lactantius remembers and encountered such religions.25 Heffernan’s
rehearsal of Lactantius’ own background foregrounds that the workings of
memory are central to the poem and its interpretation.
It is fitting that Heffernan’s work should complicate the figure of the
feminine in The Phoenix by way of memory, as the Phoenix poet himself
cannot resist the same urge. The conception of the phoenix’s own issue and
how it is sexed begins more than halfway through the poem. Indeed, when
the poet references the sex of the phoenix he attempts an explanation that
touches upon the mystery of the very knowledge which the poem struggles
to decode. Here, the poet disavows any knowledge of the phoenix’s gender,
but he manages to leave open the possibility for a bird gendered female:
god ana wat
cyning ælmihtig hu his gecynde bið
wif-hades þe weres þæt ne wat ænig
monna cynnes butan meotod ana
hu þa wisan sind wundorlice
fæger fyrn-gesceap ymb þæs fugles gebyrd. (lines 355b–360)
(Only god knows, King Almighty, what its sex is: woman or man. None
of mankind knows that, except the Measurer alone, how then the pleasant
ancient degrees are shown wondrously around the birth of this bird.)
24 Carol Falvo Heffernan, The Phoenix at the Fountain: Images of Women and Eternity in
Lanctantius’s Carmen de Ave Phoenice and the Old English Phoenix (Newark, 1988),
p. 14.
25 Heffernan, The Phoenix at the Fountain, p. 16.
171
William Rogers
This passage concerning the birth of the phoenix is pregnant with possi-
bility: both a male and a female bird exists because of the bird’s exceptional
status. The unknown quantity of the bird’s gender is one Heffernan sees as
pointing toward the masculine or feminine usage of the androgynous nature
of the phoenix – both in the Carmen and the Old English poem – but it is
a moment which holds special significance because, unlike Lactantius and
other source traditions, the Phoenix poet cannot maintain either the option
of female gender or the presence of such indeterminacy. But for the moment,
at least in the poem, this overflowing of gender into the unknown might be
better understood as the ‘wonder’ which it is. Indeed, the adverbial usage
of ‘wundorlice’ here suggests the place that ‘wonder’ has for this premodern
discussion of gender and sexual difference, as the decrees of the bird’s genesis
demonstrate the wonder of its nature. Similarly, wonder lies at the centre
of Irigaray’s system of an ethics of sexual difference. In order to ‘arrive at
the constitution of an ethics of sexual difference’, Irigaray argues, a return
to wonder is needed.26 Indeed, as she posits, ‘since wonder maintains their
[man and woman’s] identities, autonomy within their statutory difference’,
also maintained, is a ‘space of freedom and attraction between them, a possi-
bility of separation and alliance’.27 This gulf is impassable, because, according
to Irigaray, a remainder always exists, sometimes considered a neuter.28 In
consideration of the indivisibility of the neuter in Irigaray’s description of
sexual difference, it is clear that the Phoenix poet cannot help but inhabit the
descriptive place of the neuter when discussing a gender he cannot declare.
Without known decrees of gender and age, the Phoenix poet is stuck in
wonder.
While readers should be aware of the distance between the pre- and post-
modern, Irigaray’s conception of the neuter is reflected in the anxieties of the
Phoenix poet and the knowledge of the phoenix’s biology. Neither male nor
female, the phoenix vacillates in a space wholly ungoverned by the decrees
of normative gender. And, as an unknowable quantity, the gender of the bird
gives the poet the greatest pause. Indeed, in spite of this disclamation of
knowledge, the given depiction of how one knows and what one knows maps
onto a more linear, masculine-oriented system of knowledge. As he attempts
to contain the confusion of biology which the phoenix presents, the poet
employs meotod – a word which has connotations of measurement and fate –
to invoke divine power. God is the measurer, the pseudo-pagan embodiment
of fate, marking out linear destinies describing gender and, later in the poem,
age. In the overflow of the phoenix beyond the bounds of sexual difference,
gender seemingly cannot be deployed in a similar way to descriptions of

172
measurement and direction. The mention of God as just such a measurer
illustrates both the desire and failure of such a neat boundary between male
and female. Indeed, after this passage calling the phoenix’s gender into ques-
tion, the poet switches tactics and, a few lines later, explicitly uses the male
gender for the phoenix, as he has elsewhere throughout the poem. In an
effort to write the phoenix as male, the poet erases any feminine agency.
The connotations of measurement and direction influence this partial
erasure of the phoenix’s indeterminate gender. Perhaps as an explanation of
the collapse of this partly feminine bird into a single-sexed creature, the poet
unfolds the same-sex lineage of the phoenix in lines that follow directly after
the poet’s unfolding of measurement and gender:
forþon he drusende deað ne bisorgað
sare swylt-cwale þe him symle wat
æfter lig-þræce lif edniwe
feorh æfter fylle þonne fromlice
þurh briddes hád gebreadad weorðeð
eft of ascan edgeong weseð
under swegles hleo bið him self gehwæðer
sunu and swæs fæder and symle eac
eft yrfe-weard ealdre lafe
forgeaf him se meahta mon-cynnes fruma
þæt he swa wrætlice weorþan sceolde
eft þæt ilce þæt he ær þon wæs
feþrum bifongen þeah hine fyr nime. (lines 368–80)
(Even drooping, it doesn’t fear morality nor the bitter killing death, as it
knows after the flame bath, life is always new again; after a full life then
boldly into the form of a bird, it is feathered, from ashes becomes young
again. Under the shelter of the sky, it becomes both son and its own father,
and always each and likewise inheritor of relics from its parent. Granted
to it by the mighty creator of mankind that it should again be made as
wondrous in the same way as it was before when it was surrounded with
feathers, though seized by fire.)
These lines present the hollowness of the phoenix’s death, as it is turned to

ashes but also becomes the heir of those ashes, carrying them together as
the faithful might venerate a saint. As the example par excellence for the
phoenix’s metamorphosis, this passage also portrays that moment of renewal
as always dynamic or unfinished, as the phoenix’s role as father and son
makes clear that its birth is cyclical. But by making clear that the phoenix is
male and simultaneously father and son, the Phoenix poet erases necessary
feminine agency from a process of birth. At the same time, this deletion
of a maternal figure produces a generative process that is non-normative,
with respect to both gender and time. This replication, outside the realms of
biology and knowledge, forces the poet to examine other Christian allego-
173
William Rogers
ries as he continues to construct narratives to explain the gender and age of
the phoenix. While Trinitarian theories of time attempt to explain how the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit exist coevally, the ageing of the phoenix,
its immolation and life after death are hard to explain using the phoenix as
a metaphor for Christ. The old and new phoenix do not exist contemporane-
ously and coevally; it is the shell of the young that has given birth to itself and
will be the father of a new young bird, once the now-young phoenix ages.
Perhaps the difficulty of explaining the phoenix through an exposition
of the Trinity makes the use of an older story necessary. More than halfway
through the poem, the poet likens the journey of the aged phoenix to the
banishment of Adam and Eve, writing that the bird’s trajectory is most like
this original fall. The poet asserts that ‘leorneras/ wordum secgað and writu
cypað’ (teachers say with words and reveal with writing) (lines 424b–425)
that this Edenic expulsion maps most clearly onto the phoenix’s departure
from its own locus amoenus, a location which foregrounds through its explic-
itly given lack the punishments of toil, strife and age. The poet’s citation of
a previous textual tradition to explain this Edenic comparison recalls that a
textually based form of memory, one presumably defined by ecclesiastical
leaders or authorities [‘leorneras’] and their interpretations of scripture, drives
some of the confusion regarding the phoenix. Even as the poet categorizes
this tradition as unitary – as authorities tell us – it cannot be forgotten that
different versions of the phoenix exist, creating a layered history of the bird
that, again like the bird, is eternally revised. Matching the often incoherent
and contradictory source material that the poet remembers is his rehearsal
of Adam and Eve’s Edenic fall to explain the phoenix’s age and journey. This
connection between Eden and locus amoenus perhaps signals that norms
regarding sex and gender, whatever gender means in this poem and culture,
are intact. But the story remains problematic, as its foregrounding of sexual
difference in paradise and the poem’s enduring memory of man and woman
wrought as man and woman does not map onto the phoenix’s experience of
paradise, because of its unknown sex and gender.
In spite of the phoenix’s indeterminate sex, the progression and reversal
of its age is made explicit throughout the poem, as the poet reinforces the
idea that the ageing of the phoenix is both a positively viewed and negatively
charged phenomenon. After likening the fall of man to the lifespan of the
phoenix through the citation of a previous textual tradition, the poet makes
clear that the phoenix does age:
ðonne bið gehefgad haswig-feðra

gomol gearum frod [g]rene eorðan
áflyhð fugla [wyn] foldan geblowene
and þonne geseceð side rice
middan-geardes þær nó men bugað
eard and eþel. (lines 152–8)
174
(Then the grey-feathered bird, hoary, is weakened, wise with years. From
the green earth, the joy of birds flies, from the blooming earth, and then
seeks a wide kingdom of middle earth, its land and home, where no man
lives.)
Wise but weakened, the phoenix leaves its paradise, in order that it might
renew its body. This passage produces a problem unsolved by previous
readers of the poem. While old age, like winter to which it is often compared,
does not exist in the poet’s description of the locus amoenus, the signs of age
remain embodied in the portrayal of the phoenix. Grey and hoary, it lacks
power. Flying to a land devoid of men, the bird self-immolates and replicates,
beginning the cycle of regeneration which forces the poet to grapple with
wisdom’s connection to old age. As an examination of Old English literature
makes clear, contemporary depictions of old age often tie it to wisdom – frod
being synonymous with old and wise – but this exceptional figure compli-
cates an unquestioning acceptance of the age–wisdom connection, especially
when it transitions from old age to youth:
bið him neod micel
þæt he þa yldu ofestum mote
þurh gewittes wylm wendan to life
feorg geong ónfón. (lines 189–92)
(The desire is great to the bird that, through spark of knowledge, it should
change into life and accept fresh youth.)
As the poet makes clear, from age to youth, the phoenix maintains his
wisdom; indeed, like the very provocative comments about the genesis and
indeterminate gender of the figure, these shades of grey in the presentation
of the phoenix’s accumulation of wisdom are unsettling. In a place where old
age and winter do not exist the phoenix ages and dies, a fact which cannot be
erased by the decrees of indeterminacy surrounding the phoenix’s birth and
nature. The inability of the poet to correct this crux creates further difficulties
for the presentation of age and bodies in the young phoenix. The Phoenix
poet continues to read the exceptional lifespan of the phoenix in order to
make sense of what is surely a difficult connection to undo: that old signifies
wisdom. This linear progression toward knowledge is troubled by a cyclical
renewal of the body into youth while conserving wisdom, signalled by the
phrase ‘þurh gewittes wylm’, which suggests that wisdom is accumulated and
cumulative. Connecting the old phoenix with the young, the spark of knowl-
edge, reminiscent of the embodied nature of memory, marks the beginning
of the phoenix’s rebirth. It is, after all, through knowledge and wisdom that
the phoenix is able to change. In order to make sense of this never-ending
cycle of birth, death and renewal, the Phoenix poet attempts to read in this
twisting of a commonplace about wisdom a reflection of Christ’s own life,
death and resurrection.
175
William Rogers
By turning again to a Christ-centred allegory, the Phoenix poet offers an
explanation for the disruption of a correspondence between old age and
wisdom. This new reading, occurring in the final lines of the poem, high-
lights that the phoenix, similarly to Christ, is powerful, wise and young.
Mentioning that God has no beginning, the Phoenix poet writes that God
‘þurh cildes hád cenned wære’ (was born into the person of a child) (line
639) and then proceeds to stress that God, even as a child, maintained the
strength of his holiness, and defeated death through the agency of God the
father, ‘þurh fæder fultum’ (line 646a). The relationship between the child
and the father, together in the doctrine of the Trinity, are here not lost on
the poet, who maintains that, like the Christ-child, the phoenix, ‘geong in
geardum’ (young in years) (line 647a), is awakened again with full strength.
The poet further enlarges these similarities between phoenix and Christ as he
attempts to map the cult of the saints and their verbal and written memory
onto the legend of the phoenix.
After linking the body of Christ, born as a child and lacking origin, to the
ever-renewing body of the phoenix, the poet is left, like the phoenix, with the
remnants of the phoenix’s conflagration. The herbs which make possible the
resurrection of the young phoenix are likened to the words and utterances of
the saints, a community of believers and the blessed whose agency on earth
and in heaven makes manifest the power of the Christian faith. Indeed, after
the phoenix has been renewed by fire, its retrieval of its own ashes and bones
appears similar to relic adoration, suggesting that the actions of the phoenix
mimic those of the Lord, gathering the bodies of the faithful. It is a scene of
remembering in the sense that this interpretation forces its hearer to recall
past texts. The poem suggests memory again as a gathering of knowledge, as
the relics of the old and faithful are retrieved and the dismembering of fire
and doom is reversed, joining the members of the faith together as a kind
of re-membering.
This expanding allegory between phoenix and Christ, ashes and relic, and
herbs and saints emphasizes the role of memory in hagiographical texts, as
the phoenix’s eternal impulse to regenerate, gather its relics and return can
be read as a sign not only of its wisdom but also of its holiness. Gathering
and bringing together the members of the faithful through the recitation of
the narrative of the phoenix recalls that, as Carruthers has argued, holiness
and memory are connected. Indeed, according to Carruthers, ‘the choice to
train one’s memory or not, for the ancients and medievals, was not a choice
dictated by convenience: it was a matter of ethics’.29 But more than ethics,
memory might be a sign of saintliness, as Carruthers demonstrates in the
examples of Saint Antony and Saint Francis of Assisi.30 Like Antony and

176
Francis, the phoenix displays a powerful memory, perhaps symbolized by
‘þurh gewittes wylm’, the spark of knowledge that prompts the flight from
the locus amoenus. As one can see, however, memory is a concern not only
for the subject of the poem, but also for its creator, as the Phoenix poet
attempts again and again to reconcile the received tradition of this bird,
which he remembers, with his own aims and knowledge. With regard to the
bird’s indeterminate and changing gender, it is clear that the skeletal remains
of Lactantius’s poem are remembered throughout the poem, and that the
confusion on the part of the poet regarding the bird’s ‘true’ sex is not simply
symptomatic of the mysteries of the Christian faith. This unfinished erasure
suggests something about how memory might work: moved by a familiar
word or image, the poet recalls a source, and then another, in a process that
makes source study particularly difficult.
Enlarging these concerns of memory and sources, we might see the exami-
nation of this text, partially overwritten by masculine aim and imagination, as
one which Irigaray’s Ethics anticipates and desires. In Ethics, Irigaray argues:
‘[w]oman ought to be able to find herself, among other things, through the
images of herself already deposited in history and the conditions of produc-
tion of the work of man, and not on the basis of his work, his genealogy.’31
This literal archaeology of knowledge, the pushing aside of debris of history,
is necessary, according to Irigaray, in order to read that which is revised and
rewritten. As a postmodern expression of a forced forgetting of the feminine
figure, Irigaray’s desire for woman to find her reflection in images created and
inserted already in history articulates something medieval about memory.
Using ‘images of herself already deposited in history’, Irigaray appears to
suggest that women look for these traces of the feminine in order to recover
a forgotten history. Like Carruthers’ examination of recollection provided
by imagines rerum, those pictures which help bring to mind the ‘gist’ of
something remembered, Irigaray’s call for textual archaeology envisions
using the spectral presence of ‘woman’ to recall her lost history.32 Similarly
emblematic of layers of thought on age, gender and memory, The Phoenix
presents age and gender as concepts remarkable for their indeterminacy,
concepts that demonstrate that even in apparently masculine discussions of
embodied temporalities and markings of gender, traces of ‘woman’ might be
still be discovered. Indeed, this reflection of twisted age and gender seems
both programmatic and problematic, and, as I have demonstrated, the poet
is cognizant of his own troubling discourse as he attempts to account for
the weird life, death and reproduction of the phoenix. The unknown gender
of the phoenix cannot erase the biological necessity of feminine agency for
reproduction, a fact not easily forgotten. The Phoenix, the very old poem

32 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 86–91.
177
William Rogers
recalling an even older tradition, is key to reading and remembering differ-
ently. The narrative arc of the poem tells us, as modern readers, that memory
has more than one example of figures for which gender and sex is unknown
and indeterminate.
178
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Aelred of Rivaulx, ‘De institutione inclusarum’, in Aelredi Rieveallensis

Opera Omnia, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, CCCM i (Turnhout: Brepols,
1971), pp. 635–82
——, Aelred of Rievaulx’s De Institutione Inclusarum: Two English Versions, eds
John Ayto and Alexandra Barratt, EETS o.s. 287 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1984)
——, ‘A Rule of Life for a Recluse’, in Ælred of Rivaulx: Treatises and Pastoral
Prayer, trans. Mary Paul Macpherson (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publica-
tions, 1971)
——, The Liturgical Sermons: The First Clairvaux Collection, Sermons One–
Twenty-Eight, Advent–All Saints, trans. Theodore Berkeley and M. Basil
Pennington (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2001)
——, La Vie de Recluse; La Prière Pastorale, trans. Charles Dumont (Paris: Cerf,
1961)
Allen, Michael J. B. and Daniel G. Calder (trans.), Sources and Analogues of Old
English Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1976)
Amt, Emilie (ed.), Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London:
Routledge, 1993)
Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi
College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, EETS
o.s. 325 and 326 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–06)
Anselm of Canterbury, ‘Orationes sive meditationes’, in S. Anselmi Cantuariensis
Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, 6 vols, iii (Stuttgart: F. From-
mann, 1968)
Anselm of Canterbury, The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, trans. Bene-
dicta Ward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973)
Athanasius, ‘Athanasius’ Life of Saint Anthony’, in Early Christian Lives, ed. and
trans. Carolinne White (London: Penguin Classics, 1998)
Aucassin et Nicolette, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Flammarion, 1984)
Augustine of Hippo, The Fathers of the Church: The Confessions of Saint Augus-
tine, ed. and trans. Vernon J. Burke (Washington: Catholic University of
America Press, 1966)
Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram
Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1969)
Benedict of Nursia, Saint, The Rule of St Benedict, ed. and trans. Bruce L. Venarde
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2011)
179
Bibliography
Beowulf, ed. Michael Swanton, Manchester Medieval Classics (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1978)
Blamires, Alcuin (ed.), Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of
Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)
Business Contracts of Medieval Provence: Selected Notulae from the Cartulary of
Giraud Amalric of Marseilles, 1248, ed. John H. Pryor (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Medieval Studies, 1981)
Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and Other Analogous Documents Preserved
in the Public Record Office, vols 1–23 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office,
1904–55)
‘Cher alme’: Texts of Anglo-Norman Piety, ed. Tony Hunt and trans. Jane Bliss
(Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010)
Damian, Peter, Die Briefe des Petri Damiani II, ed. K. Reindel, MGH Die Briefe
in der deutschen Kaiserzeit, IV.2 (Munich: MGH, 1988)
Dhuoda, Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Councel for Her Son,
trans. Carol Neel (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991)
Dhuoda, Handbook for Her Warrior Son, ed. and trans. Marcelle Thiébaux
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, ‘The Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint Bertin’,
ed. C. H. Talbot, Studia Anselmiana xxxvii / Analecta Monastica 3rd series
(Rome: Herder, 1955), 1–117
Hali Meiðhad, ed. Bella Millett, EETS o.s. 284 (London: Oxford University Press,
1982)
Inquisitions Post Mortem (Kew, UK: The National Archives)
Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Shown to a
Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacque-
line Jenkins (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006)
Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork,
John D. Niles, new edition of 4th revised edition of Klaeber’s edition (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2008)
Kölbing, Eugen (ed.), The Romance of Sir Beves of Hamtoun, EETS e.s. 46, 48, 65
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner & Co., 1985–94, repr. as 1 vol., 1973)
Larrington, Carolyne (ed.), Women and Writing in Medieval Europe (London:
Routledge, 1995)
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (London, 1975), revised
edition, ed. M. T. Clanchy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003)
The Life of St Congar, DC/ADM8/10 (Wells: Cathedral Archives)
The Lives of the Cambro British Saints, ed. and trans. W. Rees, the Welsh MSS
Society, Llandovery (London: Longman & Co., Abergavenny: J. H. Morgan,
1853)
Médecine et justice en Provence médiévale: documents de Manosque 1262–1348,
ed. Joseph Shatzmiller (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de
Provence, 1989)
The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D8, ed. Stephen Spector, EETS, s.s. 11–12,
Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Nova Legenda Anglie, ed. Carl Horstman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901)
Old English Homilies, First Series, ed. Richard Morris, EETS o.s. 29, 34 (London:
N. Trübner and Co., 1867–68)
180
Bibliography
The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, ed. Stephen Gaselee (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1928, repr. 1937)
‘The Phoenix’, in The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, ed. Bernard J. Muir,
vol. 1 of 2 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994)
A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary:
Introduction, Critical Text and Translation, ed. Marta Powell Harley, Studies in
Women and Religion 18 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985)
Robert d’Orbigny, Le Conte de Floire et Blanchefleur, ed. Jean-Luc Leclanche
(Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003)
The Romance of Guy of Warwick: Edited from the Auchinleck Manuscript in the
Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, and from MS 107 in Caius College, Cambridge,
ed. Julius Zupita, EETS e.s. 42, 49, 59. (Bungay, UK: Clay and Sons, 1883, 1887,
1891; repr. London: Oxford University Press, 1966)
The Romance of Sir Beves of Hamtoun, ed. Eugen Kölbing, EETS e.s. 46, 48, 65
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner & Co., 1985–94, repr. as 1 vol., 1973)
The Rule of St Benedict, ed. and trans. Bruce L. Venarde (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 2011)
Sancti Augustini, Confessionum Libri XIII, in Opera, ed. Lucas Verheijen, Corpus
Christianorum Series Latina XXVII (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981)
Scottus, Sedulius, Liber de Rectoribus Christianis, ed. S. Hellmann, Quellen and
Untersuchungen zur lateinisdchen Philologie des Mittelalters (Munich: Beck,
1906)
Serverus, Sulpicius, ‘The Life of Martin of Tours by Sulpicius Serverus’, in Early
Christian Lives, ed. and trans. Carolinne White (London: Penguin Classics,
1998)
Skinner, Patricia and Elisabeth van Houts (eds), Medieval Writings on Secular
Women (London: Penguin, 2011)
Spearing, Elizabeth (ed.), Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003)
St Patrick’s Purgatory, A Poem by Marie de France, ed. and trans. M. J. Curley
(Binghampton, NY: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1993)
The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. J. Evans and John Rhys (Oxford: John
Bellows, 1893; rev. imp., Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1979)
La Theotokos de Hagia Agathè (Oppido) (1050–1064/5), ed. André Guillou (Vatican
City: Vatican, 1972)
Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, ed. and
trans. A. Jessop and M. R. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1896)
Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd, etc, ed. W. Meredith Thompson, EETS o.s. 241
(London: Oxford University Press, 1958)
Secondary Sources
Abulafia, Anna Sapir, Religious Violence between Christians and Jews: Medieval
Roots, Modern Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002)
—— Christians and Jews in Dispute (Farnham: Ashgate, 1998)
181
Bibliography
Anderson, M. D., A Saint at Stake: The Strange Death of William of Norwich, 1144
(London: Faber and Faber, 1964)
Ardener, E. (ed.), Perceiving Women (London: Malaby Press, 1975)
Armitage-Robinson, J. P., ‘A Fragment of the Life of St Cungar’, Journal of Theo-
logical Studies, 20 (1918–19), 97–108
Aston, Margaret, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval
Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984)
Bailey, Anne E., ‘Modern and Medieval Approaches to Pilgrimage, Gender and
Sacred Space’, History and Anthropology 24.4 (2013), 493–512
Bailey, B. Gregory et al., ‘Coming of Age and the Family in Medieval England’,
Journal of Family History 33.1 (2008), 41–60
Baker, Denise Nowakowski, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)
Balslev, Anindita Niyogi and J. N. Mohanty (eds), Religion and Time (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1993)
Barron, Caroline and Anne Sutton (eds), Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500
(London: Hambledon, 1994)
Bartlett, Anne Clark with Thomas H. Bestul, Janet Goebel and William F. Pollard
(eds), Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honour of Professor Valerie
M. Lagorio (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995)
Bates, David, Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton (eds), Writing Medieval Biography
750–1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow (Woodbridge: The
Boydell Press, 2006)
Baumgarten, Elisheva, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval
Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004)
Beattie, Cordelia, Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in
Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Bedell, John, ‘Memory and Proof of Age in England 1272–1327’, Past and Present
162 (1999), 3–27
Bennett, Judith, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Phil-
adelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)
——, ‘Writing Fornication: Medieval Leyrwrite and its Historians’, TRHS, 6th
ser. 13 (2003), 131–62
——, ‘“History that stands still”: Women’s Work in the European Past’, Feminist
Studies 14 (1988), 269–83
—— and Amy M. Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)
Berger, Anna Maria Busse, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2005)
Biddick, Kathleen, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003)
——, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University
Press, 1998)
Biller, Peter and Joseph Ziegler (eds), Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages
(York: York Medieval Press, 2001)
——, ‘Childbirth in the Middle Ages’, History Today 36 (1986), 42–9
Bitel, Lisa and Felice Lifschitz (eds), Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe:
New Perspectives (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)
182
Bibliography
Bloch, Maurice and J. Parry (eds), Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982)
Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, Not of Women Born: Representations of Caesarian
Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1990)
Boswell, John, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People
in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth
Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
Brubaker, Leslie and Julia M. H. Smith (eds), Gender in the Early Medieval World:
East and West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Brundage, James A., Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987)
Bruun, Mette B. and Stephanie Glaser (eds), Negotiating Heritage: Memories of
the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008)
Bullough, Donald A. and R. L. Storey (eds), The Study of Medieval Records: Essays
in Honour of Kathleen Major (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)
Bullough, Vern L., and James A. Brundage (ed.), Handbook of Medieval Sexuality
(New York: Garland, 1996)
Burger, Glenn and Steven Kruger (ed.), Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)
Burrow, J. A., The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986)
Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York and London: Routledge, 1990)
Butler, Sara, Divorce in Medieval England: From One to Two Persons in Law (New
York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2013)
—— and Wendy Turner (eds), Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages (Leiden:
Brill, 2014)
Bynum, Caroline Walker, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medi-
eval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, PA: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 2007)
——, ‘Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory
of Liminality’, in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the
Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 27–51
——, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in
Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991)
——, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval
Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987)
Cadden, Joan, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science
and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Caraveli-Chaves, Anna, ‘Bridge between Two Worlds: The Greek Lament as
Communicative Event’, Journal of American Folklore 93 (1980), 129–57
Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture,
2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; repr. 2009)
——, ‘Sweetness’, Speculum 81 (2006), 999–1013
——, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images,
400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
183
Bibliography
Cartlidge, Neil (ed.), Boundaries in Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer,
2008)
Cavallo, Sandra and Lyndan Warner (eds), Widowhood in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1999)
Cavill, Paul (ed.), The Christian Tradition in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 2004)
Caviness, Madeline H., ‘Feminism, Gender Studies and Medieval Studies’,
Diogenes 225 (2010), 30–45
Chazelle, Celia, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifschitz and Amy G. Remensnyder
(eds), Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice (New
Cherewatuk, Karen, ‘Speculum Matris: Duoda’s Manual’, Florilegium 10 (1988–91),
49–64
Chewning, Susannah Mary (ed.), The Milieu and Context of the Wohunge Group
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009)
Clanchy, Michael, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066 to 1307, 2nd
edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)
Clarke, Catherine A. M., Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 2006)
Classen, Albrecht, The Power of a Woman’s Voice in Medieval and Early Modern
Literatures (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007)
—— (ed.), Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature: A Casebook (New York and
London: Routledge, 2004)
——, ‘Widows: Their Social and Moral Functions according to Medieval German
Literature, with Special Emphasis on Erhart Gross’s Witwenbuch (1446)’,
Fifteenth Century Studies 28 (2003), 65–79
Claussen, Martin A., ‘Fathers of Power and Mothers of Authority: Dhuoda and
the Liber Manualis’, French Historical Studies 19 (1996), 785–809
Cohen, Jeffrey J., ‘The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich’, Speculum 79 (2004),
26–65
——, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003)
—— and Bonnie Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York:
Garland, 2000)
Cohen, Jeremy, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982)
Cole, Caroline, ‘The Integrity of Text and Context in the Prayers of British Library
Cotton MS Nero A. XIV’, Neophilologisches Mitteilungen civ (2003), 85–94
Coleman, Janet, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of
the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Coletti, Theresa, ‘The Chester Cycle in Sixteenth-Century Religious Culture’,
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37.3 (2007), 531–47
Conley, Verena, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1984)
Costambeys, Marios, ‘Cyngar (supp. fl. early 8th cent.)’, Oxford Dictionary of
National Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) (http:www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/6910)
184
Bibliography
Crane, Susan, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith and Culture in Anglo-Norman and
Middle English Literature (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986)
Criscuolo, Vincenzo (ed.), Le pergamene dell’Archivio vescovile di Minori (Amalfi:
Centro di Cultura e Storia Amalfitana, 1987)
Cullum, Patricia H. and Katherine J. Lewis (eds), Holiness and Masculinity in the
Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005)
Damico, Helen and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (eds), New Readings on Women
in Old English Literature (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1990)
Davies, Ben and Jana Funke (eds), Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and
Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) [Epublication based on:
9780230275478, 2011]
Davies, John Reuben, The Book of Llandaf and the Norman Church in Wales
(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003)
Davies, Wendy and Paul Fouracre (eds), Property and Power in the Early Middle
Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Davis, Isabel, ‘“Ye that pasen by þe Weiye”: Time, Topology and the Medieval
Use of Lamentations 1.12’, Textual Practice 25.3 (2011), 437–72
Davis, Kathleen, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secu-
larization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 2008)
de Hemptinne, Thérèse and Maria Gongora Diaz (eds), The Voice of Silence:
Women’s Literacy in a Men’s Church (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004)
de Weever, Jacqueline, Sheba’s Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen
Woman in Medieval French Epic (New York and London: Garland, 1998)
Delany, Sheila (ed.), Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (London:
Routledge, 2002)
Dell, Jessica, David Klausner and Helen Ostovich (eds), The Chester Cycle in
Context, 1555–1575: Religion, Drama, and the Impact of Change (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2012)
Dimmock, Jeremy, James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry
and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Dinshaw, Carolyn, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the
Queerness of Time (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012)
——, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern
(Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999)
—— and David Wallace (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s
Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Doble, G. H., ‘St Congar’, Antiquity 19 (1945–46), 32–43 and 85–95
Dockray-Miller, Mary, ‘Old English Literature and Feminist Theory: A State of
the Field’, Literature Compass 5 (2008), 1049–59
Doležalova, Lucie (ed.), The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill,
2010)
Dronke, Peter, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from
Perpetua to Marguerite Porete (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Edelman, Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004)
185
Bibliography
Edwards, Robert and Vickie Ziegler (eds), Matrons and Marginal Women in
Medieval Society (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1996)
Erler, Mary C., ‘“A Revelation of Purgatory” (1422): Reform and the Politics of
Female Visions’, Viator 38.1 (2007), 321–83
Evans, Dylan, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London:
Routledge, 1996)
Farmer, David, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th edn (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2004)
Farmer, Sharon, ‘Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives’, Speculum
61 (1986), 517–43
Fenster, Thelma and Daniel Lord Smail (eds), Fama: The Politics of Talk and
Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003)
Fentress, James and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)
Finucane, R. C., The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval
Miracles (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997)
Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (1986),
22–7
——, ‘Des Espaces Autres’, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984), 46–9
Fowler, R. C., ‘Legal Proofs of Age’, English Historical Review 22.85 (1907), 101–3
Fox, Hilary E., ‘The Aesthetics of Resurrection: Goldwork, the Soul, and the Deus
Aurifex in The Phoenix’, Review of English Studies 63 (2011), 1–19
Fradenburg, Louise and Carla Freccero (eds), Premodern Sexualities (London:
Routledge, 1996)
Franklin, Peter, ‘Peasant Widows’ “Liberation” and Remarriage before the Black
Death’, Economic History Review 39 (1986), 186–204
Frantzen, Allen and John D. Niles (eds), Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of
Social Identity (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997)
Freeman, Elizabeth, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Queer Temporalities’, special edition of
GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 13.2/3 (2007), 159–76
Fuery, Patrick, The Theory of Absence: Subjectivity, Signification, and Desire
(Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1995)
Fulton, Rachel, ‘Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice’,
Speculum 81 (2006), 700–33
Gammon, Julie, Narratives of Sexual Violence in England, 1640–1820 (Manchester:
Gaunt, Simon and Sarah Kay (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval
French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Geary, Patrick J., Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the
Virgin Mary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)
——, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First
Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)
Georgianna, Linda, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)
Genet, J.-P. (ed.), L’historiographie médiévale en Europe (Paris: Editions du CNRS,
1991)
Gibson, Gail McMurray, ‘Scene and Obscene: Seeing and Performing Late Medi-
eval Childbirth’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29.1 (1999),
7–24
186
Bibliography
——, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle
Ages (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989)
Gilbert, Jane, ‘The Practice of Gender in Aucassin et Nicolette’, Forum for Modern
Language Studies 33 (1997), 217–28
Gillespie, Vincent, Looking in Holy Books (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011)
Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London and New
York: Continuum, 2005)
Glass, David V. and David E. C. Eversley (eds), Population in History: Essays in
Historical Demography (London: Edward Arnold, 1975)
Goitein, Shlomo D., A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the
World as Portrayed in the Cairo Genizah, vol III: The Family (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1978)
Goldberg, P. J. P., ‘Girls Growing Up in Later Medieval England’, History Today
45 (1995), 25–32
——, Women in England, c. 1275–1525: Documentary Sources (Manchester:
—— (ed.), Woman Is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society, c. 1200–1500
(Stroud: Sutton, 1992)
Goldin, Simha, Jewish Women in Europe in the Middle Ages: A Quiet Revolution
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011)
Goskar, Tehmina, ‘Material Worlds: The Shared Cultures of Southern Italy and
its Mediterranean Neighbours in the 10th to 12th Centuries’, Al-Masaq 23
(2011), 189–204
Green, Monica, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority
in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
——, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (Aldershot:
Ashgate Variorum, 2000)
Gregg, Joan Young, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval
Sermon Stories (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997)
Grosjean, P., ‘Cyngar Sant’, Annalecta Bollandiana xiii (1924), 100–20
Grunmann-Goudet, Minette and Robin F. Jones (eds), The Nature of Medieval
Narrative (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980)
Halberstam, Judith, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005)
Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser
(Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
Hall, Dianne (ed.), ‘A Great Effusion of Blood’: Interpreting Medieval Violence
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004)
Halsall, Guy (ed.), Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge:
The Boydell Press, 1998)
Hanawalt, Barbara A. (ed.), Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloom-
ington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986)
Harper, April and Caroline Proctor (eds), Medieval Sexuality: A Casebook
(London: Routledge, 2008)
Harris, Ruth, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London: Allen Lane,
1999)
Harris-Stoertz, Fiona, ‘Pregnancy and Childbirth in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-
187
Bibliography
Century French and English Law’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 21.2
(2012), 263–81
——, ‘Pregnancy and Childbirth in Chivalric Literature’, Mediaevalia: An Inter-
disciplinary Journal of Medieval Studies Worldwide 29.1 (2008), 27–36
Heffernan, Carol Falvo, The Phoenix at the Fountain: Images of Woman and Eter-
nity in Lanctantius’s Carmen de Ave Phoenice and the Old English Phoenix
(Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1988)
Heffernan, Thomas J., Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographies in the
Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
Hen, Yitzhak and Matthew Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle
Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Henken, Elissa, The Welsh Saints: A Study in Patterned Lives (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 1991)
Herdt, Gilbert (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in
Culture and History (New York: Zone Books, 1994)
Hertz, Robert (ed.), Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia
Needham (London: Routledge, 2004)
Higgs-Strickland, Debra, Saracens, Demons, Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval
Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)
Hirschon, Renée, ‘Women, the Aged and Religious Activity: Oppositions and
Complementarity in an Urban Locality’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 1
(1983), 113–29
Hollis, Stephanie, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church (Woodbridge: The Boydell
Press, 1992)
Horner, Shari, The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English
Literature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001)
Hotchkiss, Valerie, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross-dressing in Medieval
Europe (New York: Garland, 1996)
Howe, Nicholas, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989)
Hughes, Diane Owen, ‘Urban Growth and Family Structure in Medieval Genoa’,
Past and Present 66 (1975), 3–28
Hughes, Muriel Joy, Women Healers in Medieval Life and Literature (Freeport,
NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1943)
Hunt, Tony, ‘La Parodie médiévale: le cas d’Aucassin et Nicolette’, Romania 100
(1979), 341–81
Irigaray, Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian
C. Gill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004)
——, ‘Women on the Market’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin
and Michael Ryan, 2nd edn (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), pp. 799–811
——, ‘Divine Women’, in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 57–72
——, The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford and Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1991)
——, ‘The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine’, in The
Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Black-
well Publishers Ltd, 1991), pp. 118–32
188
Bibliography
——, ‘La Mystérique’, in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 191–202
——, Parler n’est jamais neutre (Paris: Minuit, 1985)
——, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984)
——, ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks
and Isabelle de Courtivron (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp.
99–106
Itnyre, Cathy Jorgensen (ed.), Medieval Family Roles (New York and London:
Garland Press, 1996)
James, Liz (ed.), Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium (London:
Routledge, 1997)
Jaritz, Gerhard and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (eds), Time and Eternity: The Medi-
eval Discourse (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003)
Joeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher and Marjorie Gelus (eds), Women in German Year-
book, vol. 20 (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004)
Jonker, M. A., ‘Estimation of Life Expectancy in the Middle Ages’, Journal of the
Royal Statistical Society 166.1 (2003), 105–17
Jordan, Jessica Hope, ‘Women Refusing the Gaze: Theorizing Thryth’s “Unqueenly
Custom” in Beowulf and the Bride’s Revenge in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill
Volume I’, The Heroic Age 5 (Summer/Autumn 2001), http://heroicage.org/
issues/9/forum2/html
Karras, Ruth Mazo, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (New York:
Routledge, 2005)
Keddie, Nikki and Beth Baron (eds), Women in Middle Eastern History (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991)
Keynes, Simon, ‘Giso, Bishop of Wells (1061–1088)’, Anglo-Norman Studies 19
(1997), 203–71
Klein, Stacy S., Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006)
Kolve, V. A., The Play Called Corpus Christi (London: Edward Arnold Publishers
Ltd, 1966)
Krier, Theresa and Elizabeth D. Harvey (eds), Luce Irigaray and Premodern
Culture: Thresholds of History (London: Routledge, 2004)
Krug, Rebecca, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval
England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002)
Kruger, Steven, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
Lakas, B. A., ‘Seniority and Mastery: The Politics of Ageism in the Coventry
Cycle’, Early Theatre 9.1 (2006), 15–36
Lampert, Lisa, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadel-
phia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
Langmuir, Gavin I., History, Religion, and Antisemitism (London: I. B. Tauris
and Co. Ltd, 1990)
Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1992)
Laurent, Sylvie, Naître au moyen âge: de la conception à la naissance: la grossesse
et l’accouchement (XIIe–XVe siècle) (Paris: Léopard d’Or, 1989)
189
Bibliography
Le Goff, Jacques, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Gold-
hammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
Lee, Becky R., ‘A Company of Women and Men: Men’s Recollections of Child-
birth in Medieval England’, Journal of Family History 27.2 (2002), 92–100
——, ‘Men’s Recollections of a Women’s Rite: Medieval English Men’s Recol-
lections Regarding the Rite of the Purification of Women after Childbirth’,
Gender & History 14.2 (2002), 224–41
——, ‘The Purification of Women after Childbirth: A Window onto Medieval
Perceptions of Women’, Florilegium 14 (1995–96), 43–55
Lees, Clare A. (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages
(Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)
—— and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in
Anglo-Saxon England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2001)
Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)
LePree, James F., ‘Sources of Spirituality in the Liber Manualis of Dhuoda’,
Magistra 14 (2008), 50–67
Lewis, Katherine, Noel James Menuge and Kim Phillips (eds), Young Medieval
Women (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999)
Little, L. K. and B. H. Rosenwein (eds), Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and
Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)
Lochrie, Karma, Heterosynchrasies: Female Sexuality when Normal Wasn’t
——, J. Schulz and Peggy McCracken (eds), Constructing Medieval Sexuality
Lomperis, Linda and Sarah Stanbury (eds), Feminist Approaches to the Body in
Medieval Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)
Lowe, Lisa and David Lloyd (eds), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of the
Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)
Lowenstein, Steven M., ‘Ashkenazic Jewry and the European Marriage Pattern:
A Preliminary Survey of Jewish Marriage Age’, Jewish History 8 (1992), 155–75
McAvoy, Liz Herbert, Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011)
—— (ed.), Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe (Woodbridge: The Boydell
Press, 2010)
—— (ed.), A Companion to Julian of Norwich (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008)
——, Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of
Enclosure (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008)
——, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and
Margery Kempe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004)
—— and Diane Watt (eds), History of British Women’s Writing, vol. 1, 700–1500
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
—— and Marie Hughes-Edwards (eds), Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersec-
tions of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 2005)
MacCallum, E. L. and Mikko Tuhkanen (eds), Queer Times, Queer Becomings
(New York: State University of New York Press, 2011)
190
Bibliography
McCracken, Peggy, The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender and
Medieval Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003)
McCulloh, John M., ‘Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of
Monmouth and the Early Dissemination of the Myth’, Speculum 72.3 (1997),
698–740
McDonald, Nicola F. and W. M. Ormrod (eds), Rites of Passage: Cultures of Tran-
sition in the Fourteenth Century (York: York Medieval Press, 2004)
McKean, M. Faith, ‘Torelore and Courtoisie’, Romance Notes 3 (1961–2), 64–8
McKitterick, Rosamund, Memory and Identity in the Carolingian World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
McNamer, Sarah, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)
Marcus, Ivan, The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times
(Seattle, WA: Washington University Press, 2004)
Margolis, Ruth, Review of The Nativity, The Radio Times, 18 December 2010, p.
152
Martin, June Hall, Love’s Fools: Aucassin, Troilus, Calisto and the Parody of the
Courtly Lover (London: Tamesis, 1972)
Martin, M. T., ‘Legal Proofs of Age’, English Historical Review 22.87 (1907), 526–7
Mayeski, Marie Anne, Dhuoda: Ninth Century Mother and Theologian (Scranton,
PA: University of Scranton, 1995)
Meale, Carol M. (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1150–1500 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Menocal, Maria Rosa, ‘Signs of the Times: Self, Other and History in Aucassin
et Nicolette’, Romanic Review 80 (1989), 497–511
Meussig, Carolyn and Ad Putter (eds), Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages
(London and New York: Routledge, 2007)
Meyers, E. M., Jewish Ossuaries: Reburial and Rebirth: Secondary Burials in the
Ancient Near Eastern Setting (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1971)
——, ‘The Theological Implications of the Ancient Jewish Burial Custom’, The
Jewish Quarterly Review n.s. 62.2 (1971), 95–119
Michelet, Fabienne, Creation, Migration and Conquest (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2006)
Mirrer, Louise (ed.), Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and
Histories of Medieval Europe (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
1992)
Moreton, C. E., ‘The Walsingham Conspiracy of 1537’, Historical Research 63
(2007), 29–43
Mulder-Bakker, Anneke, ‘The Metamorphosis of Woman: Transmission of
Knowledge and the Problems of Gender’, Gender and History 12.4 (2000),
642–64
Murray, Jacqueline (ed.), Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in
the Medieval West (New York and London: Garland, 1999)
Musacchio, Jacqueline, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999)
Nelson, Janet L., ‘Writing Early Medieval Biography’, History Workshop 50 (2000),
129–36
191
Bibliography
Olson, Linda and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (eds), Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women
in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005)
Overing, Gillian, Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale and
Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990)
Parisse, Michel (ed.), Veuves et veuvage dans le haut moyen âge (Paris: Picard,
1993)
Partner, Nancy (ed.), Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism
(Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1993)
Pensom, Roger, Aucassin et Nicolete: The Poetry of Gender and Growing Up in
the French Middle Ages (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999)
Petersen, Nils Holger, Claus Clüver and Nicholas Bell (eds), Signs of Change:
Transformations of Christian Traditions and their Representation in the Arts,
1000–2000 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004)
Phillips, Kim M., Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England,
1270–1540 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)
Phillips, Susan E., Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval
England (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007)
Pierce, Joanne M., ‘“Green Women” and Blood Pollution: Some Medieval Rituals
for the Churching of Women after Childbirth’, Studia Liturgica 29 (1999),
191–215
Plate, Liedeke, Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (New
York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
Poor, Sara S., and Jana K. Schulman (eds), Women and Medieval Epic: Gender,
Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007)
Porter, Dorothy Carr, ‘The Social Centrality of Women in Beowulf’’, The Heroic
Age 5 (Spring/Summer, 2001), www.heroicage.org/issues/5/porter1.html
Postles, Dave and Joel T. Rosenthal (eds), Studies on the Personal Name in Later
Medieval England and Wales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications,
2006)
Potts, Jennifer, Lorna Stevenson and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds), Concordance
to Ancrene Wisse: MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402 (Cambridge: D.
S. Brewer, 1993)
Price, Merrall Llewelyn, ‘Re-membering the Jews: Theatrical Violence in the
N-Town Marian Plays’, Comparative Drama 41.4 (2007–8), 439–64
Pyburn, K. Anne (ed.), Ungendering Civilization (New York: Routledge, 2004)
Ramey, Lynn Tarte, Christian, Saracen and Genre in Medieval French Literature
(New York and London: Routledge, 2001)
Rheubottom, David B., ‘“Sisters first”: Betrothal Order and Age at Marriage in
Fifteenth-century Ragusa’, Journal of Family History 13 (1988), 359–76
Rieder, Paula M., On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France,
1100–1500 (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
Ringrose, Kathryn, The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of
Gender in Byzantium (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
Rissanen, M., M. Kytö and M. Palander-Collin (eds), Early English in the
Computer Age: Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter & Co., 1993)
192
Bibliography
Roberts, Anna (ed.), Violence against Women in Medieval Texts (Gainsville, FL:
University Press of Florida, 1998)
Robertson, Elizabeth, ‘Medieval Feminism in Middle English Studies: A Retro-
spective’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 26 (2007), 67–79
——, ‘“This Living Hand”: Thirteenth-Century Female Literacy, Materialist
Immanence and the Reader of the Ancrene Wisse’, Speculum 78 (2003), 1–36
—— and Christine A. Rose (eds), Representing Rape in Medieval and Early
Modern Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001)
Rollason, D. W., Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989)
——, ‘Lists of Saints’ Resting Places in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon
England 7 (1978), 61–94
Rosaldo, M. Z. and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1974)
Ross, C. D., Review of Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and other Analogous
Documents, Edward III, vol. xiii (1370–73), vol. xiv (1374–77), The English
Historical Review 72.282 (1957), 109–11
Rouse, R. A., The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005)
Rowland, Beryl, Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Knoxville,
TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1978)
Rubin, Gayle, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’,
in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and
London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210
Rubin, Miri, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (London: Allen Lane,
2009)
——, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1999)
Rudy, Gordon, Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages (New
Salih, Sarah, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 2001)
Santinelli, Emmanuelle, Des femmes éplorées? Les veuves dans la société aristocra-
tique du haut moyen âge (Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2003)
Saunders, Corinne, A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)
Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)
Schmitt, Jean-Claude, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since
the Thirteenth Century, trans. M. Thom, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge
Scragg, Donald (ed.), Edgar, King of the English 959–957, New Interpretations
(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008)
Sears, Elizabeth, The Ages of Man: Interpretations of the Life-Cycle (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1986)
Segol, Marla, ‘Medieval Cosmopolitanism and the Saracen–Christian Ethos’,
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.2 (2004), http://docs.lib.
purdue.edu/clcweb/vol6/iss2/4, 1–12
193
Bibliography
Sellars, Susan (ed.), The Hélène Cixous Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994)
Shahar, Shulamith, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 1990)
Shippey, Tom, ‘Wicked Queens and Cousin Strategies in Beowulf and Elsewhere’,
The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval North-Western Europe 5 (Summer/
Autumn, 2001), http://www.heroicage.org/issues/5/shippey1.html
Sigal, Pierre André, ‘La grossesse, l’accouchement et l’attitude envers l’enfant
mort-né à la fin du moyen âge d’après les récits de miracles’, in Santé, médecine
et assistance au moyen âge (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scienti-
fiques, 1987), pp. 23–41
Sikorska, Liliana (ed.), Thise Stories Beren Witnesse: The Landscape of the Afterlife
in Medieval and Post-Medieval Imagination (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010)
Simpson, James, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2, 1350–1547: Reform
and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Skinner, Patricia, ‘Gender, Memory and Jewish Identity: Reading a Family History
from Medieval Southern Italy’, Early Medieval Europe 13 (2005), 277–96
—— (ed.), Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological
Perspectives (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003)
—— and Elisabeth van Houts (eds), Medieval Writings on Secular Women
(London: Penguin, 2011)
Sklute, Larry M., ‘Freothuwebbe in Old English Poetry’, Neuphilologische
Mitteilungen, 71/4 (1970), 534–40
Smith, D. Vance, ‘Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves’, New Literary History
28.2 (1997), 161–74
Smith, Llinos Beverly, ‘Proofs of Age in Medieval Wales’, Bulletin of the Board of
Celtic Studies/Bwletin y Bwrdd Gwybodau Celtaidd 38 (1991), 134–44
Snellinx, Ria, ‘Humour that Divides, Humour that Unites: American Sitcoms.
A Case in Point’, Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education 2.2 (2009),
267–77
Southern, R. W., Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge
——, Saint Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought,
1059–c. 1130 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966)
Spector, Stephen, ‘Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays’, Comparative
Drama 13.1 (1979), 3–16
Stacey, Robert C., ‘The Conversion of the Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth-
Century England’, Speculum 67 (1992), 263–83
Stamp, A. E., ‘Legal Proofs of Age’, The English Historical Review 29.114 (1914),
323–4
Stevenson, Jill, Performance, Cognitive Theory and Devotional Culture: Sensual
Piety in Late Medieval York (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Stevenson, Lorna and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds), Concordances to the Kath-
erine Group and the Wooing Group (MS Bodley 34, MS Nero A XIV and Titus
D XVIII) (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000)
Stodnick, Jacqueline and Renée R. Trilling (eds), A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon
Studies (London: Wiley-Blackwell, Ltd, 2012)
Stofferahn, Steven A., ‘The Many Faces in Dhuoda’s Mirror: The Liber Manualis
and a Century of Scholarship’, Magistra 4 (1991), 89–134
194
Bibliography
Strohm, Paul, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000)
Tattersall, Jill, ‘Shifting Perspectives and the Illusion of Reality in Aucassin et
Nicolette’, French Studies 38 (July 1984), 257–67
Thiébaux, Marcelle (ed.), The Writings of Medieval Women (New York: Garland,
1997)
Thibodeaux, Jennifer, D. (ed.), Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and
Masculinity in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Thompson, Anne B., Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in the South English
Legendary (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)
Tougher, Shaun, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (London: Rout-
ledge, 2008)
Treharne, Elaine and Greg Walker (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Liter-
ature in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process (Ithaca, NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969)
Vance, Eugene, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986)
Van den Broek, R., The Myth of the Phoenix According to Classical and Early
Traditions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972)
van Houts, Elisabeth (ed.), Men, Women and the Past in Medieval Europe
(London: Longman, 2000)
——, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1999)
Vanier, Alan, Lacan (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998)
Walker, Sue Sheridan (ed.), Wife and Widow in Medieval England (Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993)
——, ‘The Feudal Family and the Common Law Courts: The Pleas Protecting
Rights of Wardship and Marriage, c. 1225–1375’, Journal of Medieval History
14 (1988), 13–31
——, ‘Free Consent and Marriage of Feudal Wards in Medieval England’, Journal
of Medieval History 8 (1982), 123–34
——, ‘Proof of Age of Feudal Heirs in Medieval England’, Mediaeval Studies 35
(1973), 306–23
Ward, Joseph P. (ed.), Violence, Politics and Gender in Early Modern England
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
Warren, Ann K., Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1985)
Watson, Nicholas, ‘The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’,
Speculum 68 (1993), 637–83
Watt, Diane, Medieval Women Writers (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007)
—— (ed.), Medieval Women in Their Communities (Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 1997)
Waugh, Scott L., The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in
English Society and Politics, 1217–1327 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1988)
Weiss, Judith, Jennifer Fellows and Morgan Dickson (eds), Medieval Insular
Romance: Translation and Innovation (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000)
195
Bibliography
Whitrow, G. J., Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
Wickham, Chris, ‘Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry’, Past
and Present 160 (1998), 3–24
Willaert, Frank, Herman Braet, Thom Mertens and Theo Venckeleer (eds), Medi-
eval Memory: Image and Text (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004)
Wilson, Katharina M. (ed.), Medieval Women Writers (Athens, GA: University
of Georgia Press, 1984)
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans (eds),
The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory
1280–1520 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999)
Wolf, Eric, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1982)
Wood, Diana (ed.), Women and Religion in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford
Woolf, Rosemary, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968)
Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)
Yarrow, Simon, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-Century
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Yearley, Janthia, ‘A Bibliography of Planctus’, Journal of the Plainsong and Medi-
eval Music Society 4 (1981), 12–52
Youngs, Deborah, The Life Cycle in Western Europe, c. 1300–1500 (Manchester:
Websites
Arlima: Archives de literature du moyen age: Christine de Pizan: http://www.

arlima.net/ad/christine_de_pizan.html
Douay-Rheims Bible: www.drbo.org
EuroPROFEM: The European Men Profeminist Network: http://www.europrofem.
org/material/books/09.book.htm
Feminae: The Medieval Women and Gender Index: http://inpress.lib.uiowa.edu/
feminae/OtherResources.aspx
The Guardian Newspaper: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/23/bbc-
nativity-drama-anti-jewish
The Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies: http://labyrinth.georgetown.edu/
display.cfm?Action=View&Category=Women
Manchester University Press Medieval Resources Online: http://www.medievals-
ources.co.uk/portal_women.htm
Mapping Margery Kempe: http://college.holycross.edu/projects/kempe/
Medieval Sourcebook: Sex and Gender: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1v.
html
Middle English Dictionary (Online): http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/lookup.
html (Ann Arbor, 2001)
196
Bibliography
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/
article/6910 (accessed 4 March 2009)
St Hildegard of Bingen: Doctor of the Church: http://www.hildegard.org/
197
Index
Abelard, Peter, 117 Black, Daisy, 11–12, 27

Aelred of Rievaulx, 98–9, 101, 107 Bloch, Maurice, 116–17
De institutione inclusarum, 79, 82 blood, gendered nature of, 69–70
Liturgical Sermons, 82, 92 Brown, Jennifer, 81
‘Rule of Life for a Recluse’, 96–7 Buchelt, Lisabeth, 169
allegory, 120, 166–7, 173–4, 176 Bullough, Vern, 134
anchorites/anchoritic practice, 95–110 Butler, Judith, 4, 129, 165n6
ascetic practice, 96–9, 101, 135, 143 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 89n38, 114, 116, 118
celibacy, 138, 143
devotional literacy, 80–1, 83, 85 Cadden, Joan, 135, 136n33
digging of graves, 100 Caraveli-Chaves, Anna, 116
female body as spatial abstraction, 97–108 Carruthers, Mary, 7, 62, 72, 81, 99, 141, 161, 167,
imaginative presence of Christ, 80–92 169–70, 176–7
male anchorites, 138 Caviness, Madeline, 20
remembrance of Christ, 79–93 Chakrabarty, Dipash, 2
sensory apprehension of Christ, 86, 90 chantefable, 9, 29, 30
spiritual kissing, 84–6 see also Aucassin et Nicolette
anchoritic space and espacement, 10–12, 97–108, Chewning, Susannah, 81
110, 113 childbearing/childbirth, 3, 5, 9–10, 13, 19–20,
anchoritic time and temporality, 11, 80–2, 23, 45–59
88–93, 96–7 announcement of, 55–6
anchoritic writings attendants and witnesses, 46, 50–6
A Revelation of Love (Julian of Norwich), baptism rituals, 46–54, 56–9
102–6 gendered memory, 45–59
A Revelation of Purgatory (nun of gift-giving, 55–7
Winchester), 106–10 Inquisitions Post Mortem, 9–10, 45–59, 114
Ancrene Wisse, 10–11, 79–80, 83–6, 99–101, midwives, 53–4, 53n29
107–10 purification rites, 23, 48, 56, 57–8
Rule of St Benedict, 143 role of men in childbirth and birth rituals,
Wooing Group texts, 10–11, 79–93 51–2, 58
see also Aelred of Rievaulx; St Anselm of Christianity/Christian theology
Canterbury Augustinian treatment of time, 5–7
Aristotle, 1 bird symbolism, 167–8
Aucassin et Nicolette, 9, 29–44 chaste marriage, 154–5
conception and birth of Christ, 149, 155,
Bailey, Anne E., 11 155n33, 158–60, 167
Bartlovà, Milena, 81 conceptions of time, 5–7, 148–50, 157–62
Baumgarten, Elisheva, 19 Crucifixion and Passion of Christ, 82–3,
Beauchamp, Richard, Earl of Warwick, 106 87–92, 114, 117, 149
Bedell, John, 47n5, 48, 51 dramatized theology, 147–62, 163–78
Bennett, Judith, 14, 16n13, 20, 21n33, 27n53 Eden and the Fall, 5–6, 97, 148, 169, 174
Beowulf, 10, 61–77, 163, 169 female conversionary role, 117, 121–2, 125–6
Bernard of Clairvaux, 161n56 Incarnation, 12, 150, 153, 157
Beves of Hampton, 137n35, 140 Knights of Christ, 138, 143–4
Biddick, Kathleen, 2, 7, 159 Marian devotion, 151–2
Bildhauer, Bettina, 22 paradise, 5, 97, 169–70, 174–5
bisexuality, 35, 164n5 purgatory, 106, 108–9
199
Index
Resurrection of Christ, 79, 92, 114, 117–18, Falvay, David, 81
120–1, 167, 175 Farmer, David, 130n11
rituals and temporal cycles, 5, 23, 27, fasting, 96–7, 99
48–50, 46–54, 56–9, 92, 118, 125 feasting, 5, 49–50, 55–8, 92–3
Second Coming of Christ, 5 feminine space, 96, 102, 105, 150, 165
shrines and pilgrimages, 109, 122, 124, 144, femininity, 12, 43, 142, 150
151, 151n15, 163 feminism/feminist studies, 14, 17, 26, 28n55, 98,
supersessionism, 149–52, 155, 159–62 115, 125, 163
Trinitarian theory of time, 174 Fentress, James, 50
Cixous, Hélène, 35, 67 Floritia, 24–5
Clanchy, Michael, 47 Foucault, Michel, 4, 101
Clarke, Catherine A. M., 166n12, 169–70 Fox, Hilary, 168
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 12, 32, 127 Freud, Sigmund, 30n6, 35
Coleman, Janet, 81 Fuery, Patrick, 80
Constantina, 25 Fulton, Rachel, 81n10
Costambeys, Marios, 130n11 Funke, Jana, 30–1, 31n6
Cox, Elizabeth, 10, 163, 169
Crane, Susan, 131, 131n17 Geary, Patrick J., 50, 81, 153
cross-dressing, 22, 42 gender
Croxton Play of the Sacrament, 152 identity, 29–44, 127–45
inequality, 20–1
Davie, Ben, 30–1, 31n6 male dominance of written culture, 26
Davis, Kathleen, 149 pay gap, 16, 16n13
death, 16, 48, 50, 51, 93 performativity, 4, 127–45
bereavement, 22–3 ‘third gender’ studies, 22
burial and funeral ritual, 116–17, 119, 121, transgression, 9
125 see also femininity; masculinity; women
cemeteries, 4n14, 119, 122 gendered concept/experience of time, 3–4, 9,
double funerals, 116–17 11, 13–28, 30–1, 38–40, 42–4, 96, 105, 114,
gendered conceptions of, 114, 116–17 150, 165–6, 170
memory and, 114, 116–17 gendered life-cycles, 3–5, 8–10, 13–28, 150
mourning and lamentation, 13, 67, 69, 73, gendered memory, 7–11, 13, 26, 45–59, 67–8,
116–17, 121 75–8, 95–110, 111–26
prayer for the dead, 5, 108, 109 Gilbert, Jane, 33, 42
regeneration and, 12, 173–7 Gillespie, Vincent, 89–90
symbols of continuity and opposition, Girard, René, 69
116–22, 125 Giso, Bishop of Wells, 132, 132n19
widowhood, 21, 23, 24, 69 Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, 91
women’s role in grave-management, 116 Liber confortatorius, 79, 82–3
women’s role in remembrance, 50, 122–5 Goskar, Tehmina, 20
de Pisan, Christine, 19 gossip, 16n16
de Worde, Wynkyn, 128 Guy of Warwick, 137n35, 144
Dhuoda, 18
Dickson, Morgan, 135 Hagen, Susan K., 81
Dinkova-Bruun, Greti, 81 hagiography and sainthood, 133
Dinshaw, Carolyn, 1–5, 8, 12, 13, 15, 31n6, 32 cult of saints, 117–20, 122–3
disguise, 135–6 gendered time and memory, 11, 114–26
Doble, G. H., 130 Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich,
Dudoc, Bishop of Wells, 132n19 111–26
Dumont, Charles, 92 male sanctity, 11
miracles, 112, 113, 118, 122–4, 139, 142, 144
Edelman, Lee, 31, 33–6, 43–4 nature/culture dichotomy, 115–17, 119–20,
Edgar the Peaceful, King of England, 140 122–6
Erler, Mary C., 106, 107 permeable boundary with romance, 127,
espacement, 10–12, 98–108, 110, 113 129–45
eunuchs, 22 symbols of continuity and opposition,
expiration dating, 29, 29n3, 31–2, 35, 38, 41, 116–22, 125
43, 44 translation (translatio) of relics, 118–20, 122
200
Index
vita of St Congar, 127–45 A Revelation of Love, 102–6
see also individual saints
Hajnal, John, 24 Kempe, Margery, 19
Halberstam, Judith, 2–4, 31n6, 34–5 Klein, Stacey, 73
Halbwachs, Maurice, 50
Harris-Stoertz, Fiona, 9–10, 11, 26, 114, 116 Lacan, Jacques, 31, 32, 80
Heffernan, Carol, Falvo, 171–2 Lactantius, 164, 168, 171–2, 177
Heidegger, Martin, 164 see also Phoenix, The
hermaphrodites, 22 Lampert, Lisa, 151n14
heteronormativity, 1, 9, 21, 33, 35 Langmuir, Gavin, 159n47
heterosexuality, 2–4, 22 Lazikani, Ayoush, 10, 96, 99
normalized, 35 Lee, Becky, 48, 58
nuclear family, 3 Lefebvre, Henri, 95–6
temporality, 10 Le Goff, Jacques, 27n52
heterotopia/heterotopic space, 4–5, 4n14, 101–2, Lemaître, J., 82
105, 107–10 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 63, 115
Hickes, George, 66 liminal space/figures, 11, 108, 127–9, 131–2,
Hildegard of Bingen, 18–19 134–5, 137, 141, 145
history see also queer time/queering of time
male-authored, 10 literacy, 47, 80n4
marginalized/erased subjects, 2–4, 23–4, Lochrie, Karma, 21
27n53, 177
master narratives, 7 MacCallum, E. Line, 3
oral, 5, 10, 61, 68 Macnamara, JoAnn, 135
reification of time and memory, 7 Macpherson, Mary Paul, 82
transmission of, 61–2 Marie de France, 138n36
written, 50–1 Martin, M. T., 47n5
see also gendered memory; memorialization/ Mary of Egypt, 124
memorial practices; memory Mary Magdalene, 121
homosexuality, 30n6, 43 Mary, mother of Christ, 11–12, 79, 87–9, 100–1,
jouissance, 31–2 109–10, 121, 147–62
‘lesbian-like’ lives, 22n33 masculinity
same-sex relationships, 26 changing conceptions of, 11–12
see also queer time/queering of time chivalric, 133–4
Horner, Shari, 70, 71, 74, 77 holy, 133, 137–9
Howe, Nicholas, 61 male life courses/stages, 27
Hunt, Tony, 37 male sanctity, 11, 135, 137–9
patriarchal, 4
Innes, Matthew, 61 performance of, 127–45
Innes-Parker, Catherine, 88 relation to time, 3, 11, 13, 139, 150
Irigaray, Luce, 3–4, 6, 8, 10–11, 62–3, 71n31, 72, virginity/chastity, 135–8
75, 98, 100, 101, 104–5, 107, 110, 150, 154, warriors, 70
164–6, 172, 177 McAvoy, Liz Herbert, 10–11, 31n6, 138, 164
McCracken, Peggy, 69–70
James, Montague Rhodes, 112 McLaughlin, Megan, 143
Jamison, Carol Parrish, 64–5, 76 McNamer, Sarah, 80
Jessopp, Augustus, 112 medieval studies, 2, 14–15, 20
Jews/Judaism, 27, 151–6 medieval women writers, 19n25, 26n49
anti-Semitism, 151–2, 152n20 see also anchoritic writings; Julian of
blood libel, 111–12, 114, 152 Norwich
conversion to Christianity, 160 memorialization/memorial practices, 8, 23, 72,
double burial practice, 117 116, 128–9, 140, 168–9
medieval iconography, 156 memory
violence against Jews, 152n19 art of forgetting, 161
Joan of Arc, 19 bestiaries as mnemonic tool, 167
Jordan, Jessica, 75 collective and cultural remembering, 7–8,
Jordan, Tony, 147 10, 45–59
Julian of Norwich, 10–11, 81, 101–2, 107, 108, 110 construction of time and the past, 6–7
201
Index
cultural myth, 61–2 time; gendered memory; history; memory;
cultural transmission, 61–77 temporality; time
identity and, 7–8, 166 Pensom, Roger, 37–8, 40, 42
material and textual, 166, 169, 174 Phillips, Helen, 133n22
mnemonic tools, 68, 81, 167 Phoenix, The, 12, 163–78
multiple, 8 Plate, Liedeke, 7, 102
oral culture, 5, 10, 61–2, 130, 166n11 Porter, Dorothy Carr, 65
praxis vs. doxis, 7 prayer, 5, 81n10, 84–5, 89, 108–10, 133, 139
reinforcement through repetition, 26
sign of saintliness, 176 queer multiplicities, 4, 12
training of, as ethical choice, 176 queer time/queering of time, 3, 5, 12, 29–44
transformation of memories, 161
use of written records, 45–59 Ramey, Lynn, 42
see also gendered memory; history Renevey, Denis, 86n31
Meredith, Peter, 150n11 Robertson, Elizabeth, 18n18
Merina people of Madagascar, 116 Robinson, J. Armitage, 130
Miles, Laura Saetveit, 98–9, 101–2 Rogers, William, 12
Millett, Bella, 83n22, 90 Rollason, David, 144
modernism romance narratives, 127–45
heteronormative legacy, 1–3, 21, 22n33 Rouse, R. A., 130–1, 139–40
homogeneous normative frameworks, 2 Rowland, Beryl, 167
postmodernism, 2 Rubin, Gayle, 63–4
premodern/modern dichotomy, 2
Morgan, Pamela E., 11 St Alexis, 136
Mulder-Bakker, Anneke, 23 St Anselm of Canterbury, 81n10, 84–5, 84n27
Murray, Jacqueline, 133–4 Orationes sive meditationes, 85, 88–9
Musacchio, Jacqueline, 57 St Antony, 176–7
myth, 5, 61, 163–78 St Augustine, 1, 5–7
St Congar, 11, 127–45
nature/culture dichotomy, 115–17, 119–20, St Francis of Assisi, 176–7
122–6 St Guinefort, 123, 124
neo-Platonism, 5 St Martin of Tours, 136
N-Town plays, 147–62 St Peter Damian, 16n12
Joseph’s Doubt, 11–12, 150–62 St Robert of Bury, 152
Salutation and Conception, 152 St William of Norwich, 11, 111–26, 152
The Marriage, 153–4, 157 Salih, Sarah, 22
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 80
old age, 164–6, 169–70, 176 Scarry, Elaine, 103
oral histories, 5, 10, 61–2, 68 sexual difference, 4, 164–6, 172, 174
Ortner, Sherry, 114, 115, 117, 122, 125 sexuality, 14, 30–2, 163
Overing, Gillian, 75 medieval, 26, 26n48
social control of, 63
patriarchy see also gender; heterosexuality;
hegemonic phallic logic, 98 homosexuality
ownership of women through the gaze, 75 Shippey, Tom, 64, 73
subjugation of women, 3, 62–4, 67–8, 98 Simpson, James, 159n46
universalizing of masculinity, 4 Skinner, Patricia, 5, 8–9, 12, 45
past/pastness Sklute, Larry M., 65, 74
accumulating, 4 space(s)
construction and conception of, 2 dominant position of men, 11
ever present/synchronous, 1 fantasmatic, 4
excluded subjects, 3 female, 17, 102, 105, 157
generation of, 4 gendered, 4
influence of, on present and future, 61 heterotopia/heterotopic space, 4–5, 4n14,
medieval attitude to, 141 101–2, 105, 107–10
precariousness of, 7–8 liminal/queer, 11, 108, 127
sexed and gendered conceptions of, 3, 7 meanings and everyday spaces, 4–5
see also gendered concept/experience of ordering of, by time, 2, 96, 104
202
Index
policing of, by time, 2 Turner, Victor, 127–8, 135
sacred, 4, 96, 104, 139, 140, 144 Turner, Victoria, 9
see also espacement; temporality; time
Spearing, Elizabeth, 8 van Houts, Elisabeth, 8, 13, 45, 50, 52, 81
Stephen of Bourdon, 123, 124
Strohm, Paul, 81 Wickham, Chris, 50
Sutherland, Annie, 90n42 William of Monmouth, 11
wisdom, 163–4, 175–6
Tattersall, Jill, 30 Wolf, Erik, 23–4, 27n53
temporality women
consciousness of, 8 agency and choice, 23, 170, 173, 177
contingency of, 1 biographies, 18–19
heteronormative conceptions of, 1–4, 9, bodily experience, 3
33–5 cyclical experience of time, 9, 13, 26, 105,
hypothetical, 3 170
liturgical, 107 divorce, 15n11, 15–16
male vs. female model, 3–4 domestic role, 115
matrix of human perception, 7 dowries, 20
multiple temporalities (heterochronies), as dwelling-space, 96–101, 110
4–5, 4n14, 8, 10 elective virginity, 3
phallic, 102 as exchange commodity, 62–4, 68–9, 75–6
queer, 34 exclusion from the universal, 3
reproductive, 2 as ‘gifts’ in marriage, 63–4
sexuality and, 31, 165 life-cycles/life course, 3–5, 8–10, 13–28, 170
the ‘now’, 2, 4–6, 10, 12 marginalized/erased subjects, 2–4, 14, 23–4,
see also time 27n53, 177
Thibodeaux, Jennifer, 142–3 marriage, 15n11, 15–17, 20, 21–2, 24–5, 63–4
Thomas of Monmouth, 112–13, 115, 117, 120, motherhood, 17, 20–1
123–6 nature/culture dichotomy, 115–17, 119–20,
time 122–6
being in time, 1–2 old age, 16, 24–5
cyclical, 9, 13, 26, 148, 164, 166 ownership of, through the male gaze, 75
disruption of, 4–5, 109, 139, 140, 144–5 paid work, 16
divine/eternal, 5, 148 patriarchal subjugation of, 3, 62–4, 67–8, 98
ecclesiastical debate, 5–7 remarriage, 16–17
event-based progression, 27n53 role as peaceweavers, 61–78
inextricable link with space, 2 self-harm, 99, 101
linear, 2, 3, 11, 13–29, 33–5, 39, 44, 89, self-loathing and denial, 98
90n42, 96, 98, 102, 104, 108, 131, 139–40, servants/domestic service, 16, 25, 54–5
148–50, 154–5, 161, 164 single/never married, 21–2, 21n33, 26
measurement of, 1 spectral presence, 12, 163, 177
networks, 4 stepmothers, 16–17, 16n12
reification of, 2 violence against, 17, 17n18, 68–9
renewal and regeneration, 163–78 virginity, 21–2
self-negating character of, 6 visibility, 23–4
stagnation/suspension of, 9, 22–3, 27, widowhood, 21, 23, 24
29–30, 40 wills and legal documents, 24–5
theological conceptions of, 5–7, 148–50, 157 woman as vessel/spatial abstraction, 3,
as valued commodity, 27 97–108
see also gendered concept/experience of see also anchorites/anchoritic practice;
time; gendered life-cycles; gendered childbearing/childbirth; gendered
memory; queer time/queering of time concept/experience of time; gendered
Tomasch, Sylvia, 156 life-cycles; gendered memory
transsexuals, 22 Woolf, Virginia, 95–6, 110
Tuhkanen, Mikko, 3
Turner, Edith 127 Youngs, Deborah, 14
203
AND MEMORY IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE
RECONSIDERING GENDER , TIME
The training and use of memory was
crucial in medieval culture, given the
limited literacy at the time, but, to date,
very little thought has been given to the
complex and disparate ways in which
theories and practices of memory inter-
acted with the inherently unstable
concepts of time and gender prevalent
during the period. Drawing on approaches
from applied poststructural and queer
theory among others, the essays in this
volume reassess those ideologies, meanings
and responses generated by the workings
of memory within and over “time”.
Ultimately, they argue for the fundamental
instability of the traditional gender-time-
memory matrix (within which men are
configured as the recorders of “history”
and women as the repositories of a more
inchoate familial and communal
knowledge), revealing the Middle Ages as
a locus for a far more fluid concept-
ualization of gender, time and memory
than has previously been considered.
E LIZABETH C OX is Lecturer in Old English at Swansea University; R OBERTA
R
COX, MCAVOY AND MAGNANI (eds)
M AGNANI is Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Swansea University; L IZ
econsidering
H ERBERT M C AVOY is Professor of Medieval Literature at Swansea University.
CONTRIBUTORS: Anne E. Bailey, Daisy Black, Elizabeth Cox, Fiona Harris-
Gender, Time
Stoertz, Ayoush Lazikani, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Pamela E. Morgan, William
Rogers, Patricia Skinner, Victoria Turner.
and Memory in
Cover illustration: ‘Horlogue de Sapience’ (Clock of Wisdom). Henry Suso, Horlogue de
Sapience. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, MS IV.III, f. 13v. By kind permission
of Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

Medieval Culture
Edited by Elizabeth Cox,
an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and
Liz Herbert McAvoy
668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620–2731 (US)
www.boydellandbrewer.com
and Roberta Magnani

(Cox-Magnani) - Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture-D. S. Brewer (2015)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Cox-Magnani) - Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture-D. S. Brewer (2015)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

AND MEMORY IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE

RECONSIDERING GENDER , TIME

E LIZABETH C OX is Lecturer in Old English at Swansea University; R OBERTA

CONTRIBUTORS: Anne E. Bailey, Daisy Black, Elizabeth Cox, Fiona Harris-

Gender in the Middle Ages

Reconsidering Gender, Time and

Also in this series:

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation

First published 2015

ISBN 978 1 84384 403 7

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

List of Contributors vii

Introduction: In principio: The Queer Matrix of Gender, Time 1

1 The Pitfalls of Linear Time: Using the Medieval Female Life-Cycle 13

Daisy Black is Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the

Fiona Harris-Stoertz received her Ph.D. from the University of California

Ayoush Lazikani is currently Stipendiary Lecturer in Old and Middle English

Liz Herbert McAvoy is Professor of Medieval Literature at Swansea Univer-

Roberta Magnani is Lecturer in English Literature at Swansea University,

Pamela E. Morgan has recently completed a Ph.D. at Swansea University

William Rogers is a lecturer in the English Department at Case Western

Patricia Skinner is Reader in Medieval History at Winchester University

Victoria Turner is a Lecturer in French at the University of St Andrews.

CCCM Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (Turnhout:

Liz Herbert McAvoy

3 Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, p. 12.

(New York and London, 2005), p. 5.

11 Irigaray, Ethics, p. 12.

15 Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, p. 36.

17 Augustine, Confessions, Book IX, Ch. XIV, p. 202 (p. 343).

Here Augustine configures both present and future as mediated by the

The Pitfalls of Linear Time: Using the

B ased on the experiences I have shared with Elisabeth van Houts in

7 Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?, p. 3.

material/books/09.book.htm (accessed 7 December 2009). Medieval work has yet

48 John Boswell’s pioneering Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay

Medieval Expiration Dating? Queer Time and

A n effeminate hero, an aggressive heroine and a pregnant king: at first

It is in this light that I refer to the presentation of time in Aucassin et Nico-

In this Lacanian paradigm, the sinthome is essentially ‘the template of a given

10 Edelman, No Future, p. 39.

17 Aucassin et Nicolette, p. 165, n. 6.

20 Davies and Funke, ‘Introduction’ in Sex, Gender and Time, p. 3.

He objects to Nicolette primarily as she is a slave who was purchased from

24 See récit II, 25–9.

Yet I propose that what is at stake in Aucassin et Nicolette is not a binary

27 Pensom, Aucassin et Nicolete, p. 31.

30 Tu passas devant son lit,

31 Pensom, Aucassin et Nicolete, p. 100.

Remembering Birth in Thirteenth- and

L ate thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century English ‘proof of age’ records

15 van Houts, Memory and Gender, esp. p. 38.

27 van Houts, Memory and Gender, p. 2 and throughout.

31 See for example, The National Archives, C 133/40 (19).

53 IPM vol. 5, no. 157.

62 See for example IPM vol. 6, no. 240.

72 For purification, see Paula M. Rieder, On the Purification of Women: Churching in

‘Ides gnornode/geomrode giddum’:

T he Old English poem Beowulf is about memory. The poem is found in

In a world where there were no books, or very few, memory performed a