Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100

Diane Watt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474270649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

Women's literary histories usually start in the later Middle Ages, but recent scholarship has shown that actually women were at the heart of the emergence of the English literary tradition. Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 focuses on the period before the so-called 'Barking Renaissance' of women's writing in the 12th century. By examining the surviving evidence of women's authorship, as well as the evidence of women's engagement with literary culture more widely, Diane Watt argues that early women's writing was often lost, suppressed, or deliberately destroyed. In particular she considers the different forms of male 'overwriting', to which she ascribes the multiple connotations of 'destruction', 'preservation', 'control' and 'suppression'. She uses the term to describe the complex relationship between male authors and their female subjects to capture the ways in which texts can attempt to control and circumscribe female autonomy. Written by one of the leading experts in medieval women's writing, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 examines women's literary engagement in monasteries such as Ely, Whitby, Barking and Wilton Abbey, as well as letters and hagiographies from the 8th and 9th centuries. Diane Watt provides a much-needed look at women's writing in the early medieval period that is crucial to understanding women's literary history more broadly.

1

Women’s Literary Communities at Ely and Whitby

Introduction

The first examples of the overwriting of women’s literary culture come from the beginning of our period: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, completed in 731. Book four of the Ecclesiastical History, a work as a whole concerned with chronicling the foundation of the English church, includes the lives of three founding abbesses: Æthelburh (Ethelburga) of Barking (fl. 664); Æthelthryth (Etheldreda) of Ely (c. 636–679); and Hild of Whitby (614–680).¹ The lives of all three women, who wielded considerable political as well as religious power, suggest that early medieval female sanctity fitted into a long-standing tradition of women’s visions and prophecy that originated in the pre-Christian era and continued to the Reformation and beyond.² Bede, like many of the influential churchmen who succeeded him, was divided in his motives: on the one hand, he wanted to honour and promote these early foundations by recording significant people and events associated with them; but on the other, he felt uncomfortable with, and therefore tried to contain textually, the degree of autonomy and power wielded by the early abbesses, autonomy and power which was subsequently circumscribed by monastic reform. Bede’s accounts of these elite women elide their sources, which would certainly have included lives of the founding abbesses originally composed within their religious houses. While it is well known that Bede often failed to acknowledge his sources, whether he was writing about men or women (as is demonstrated in his rewriting of the anonymous Life of Cuthbert, discussed in the Introduction), the significance of this in relation to women’s writing, where so little early evidence remains, is all the greater. In this chapter, I aim to explore in detail the traces that remain in the surviving record of the earliest monastic women’s writing, focusing specifically on the religious houses of Ely and Whitby in the seventh and early eighth centuries. Further evidence of a tradition of women’s writing in Latin emerging from the important religious house at Barking will be analysed in the following chapter, alongside evidence of writing emerging from the women’s house at Minster-in-Thanet. I argue here that Bede ‘overwrote’ the women’s lives in the sense that he wrote over, and thus partially obliterated accounts, whether written or oral, that had been produced in the abbesses’ own monasteries. This chapter will focus initially on Bede’s narratives of Æthelthryth and Hild. Æthelburh will be considered in Chapter 2 in the context of my exploration of the thriving literary culture at Barking.

The lives of the two important and powerful abbesses, Æthelthryth and Hild, stand in close proximity in the Ecclesiastical History, and Bede clearly intends them to be read together. Bede’s life of Æthelthryth of Ely is given particular prominence in the Ecclesiastical History because it is accompanied by the Hymn to Æthelthryth which Bede himself composed. Æthelthryth is adopted by Bede as a representative of the ideal of female virginal piety, and Bede adapts her story to reinforce this point. In this chapter, I argue that traces of a different version of the life of Æthelthryth can nevertheless still be detected; an underlying narrative with a greater focus on the community at Ely and on a wider network of female religious, including a more pronounced emphasis on the role of Æthelthryth’s sister Seaxburh. In writing his life of Hild, Bede faced a greater challenge. Hild, a patron of an educated scholarly community of women and men, as well as a powerful political figure in her own right, does not conform to Bede’s model of virginal piety. In this case, not only does it seem likely that a lost life of Hild, written by her own community, once existed, which Bede drew upon, but it is also possible to reconstruct elements of this hagiography from another early text, in this case a version of the Old English Martyrology. Reading the Old English Martyrology alongside Bede’s life of Hild provides further supporting evidence of the visionary concerns of the Whitby community. Furthermore, although lives of Æthelthryth and Hild, produced by their own communities, have not come down to us, one crucially important early Whitby text has survived: the anonymous first Life of Gregory the Great. This hagiography was produced at Whitby under the rule of Hild’s successor Ælfflæd. It is a key text in the history of the conversion of the English, and another possible unacknowledged source of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. The Whitby Life of Gregory thus provides us with an example of the sort of underwriting or lost or unacknowledged source texts on which Bede drew, and, significantly it is one which may also have been female-authored.

Æthelthryth, Ely and Bede’s Hymn

At the heart of the fourth book of Ecclesiastical History lies Bede’s life of Æthelthryth, the founding abbess of Ely. Bede describes Æthelthryth’s pious life and death and the translation of her body (EH 4.19), and composes his Hymn about her (EH 4.20).³ This life would subsequently be incorporated along with a range of other sources (including possibly an Old English vita) into the Liber Eliensis, compiled in Ely in the late twelfth century.⁴ Æthelthryth, who succeeded in remaining chaste through two marriages, represents for Bede the perfect state of virginity. Indeed Bede overwrites Æthelthryth’s life in order to make it fit his ideal. His retelling of her narrative passes relatively quickly over her life as a devout wife: ‘She had previously been married to an ealdorman of the South Gyrwe, named Tondberht. But he died shortly after the marriage and on his death she was given to King Ecgfrith. Though she lived with him for twelve years she still preserved the glory of perfect virginity’ (EH 4.19, p. 391). In contrast, Bede pays far more attention to her life as a woman religious (her self-discipline, mortification of the flesh, and physical suffering), and especially to her death. As Virginia Blanton points out, Bede’s treatment of Æthelthryth in Ecclesiastical History is exceptional: ‘the story of Æthelthryth is fixated on her perfection.’⁵ Æthelthryth plays such a central role in the fourth book of the Ecclesiastical History because she represents Bede’s ideal of female sanctity.

Bede’s Hymn to Æthelthryth is itself a remarkable document, celebrating as it does a form of heroic virginity that only partially fits Æthelthryth’s own circumstances. Contrasting himself to Virgil (‘Maro’), Bede asserts that he writes of peace rather than war, and of chastity rather than rape. Unexceptionally, Bede figures Æthelthryth as the bride of Christ and likens her to the Virgin Mary. Yet Bede also lists as examples of chastity the legendary virgin martyrs Agatha, Eulalia, Thecla, Euphemia, Agnes and Cecilia, who variously endured attempted seductions, imprisonment in brothels, and violent and often sexualized torture. While Æthelthryth’s dedication of her virginity to God resonates with the vows of Agnes, Cecilia and Thecla, there are few other direct similarities. Æthelthryth’s husbands do not rape her; she is not tortured; and she is not martyred. Indeed she dies of natural causes: as a victim of the plague, afflicted by ‘a very large tumour beneath her jaw’ (EH 4.19, p. 395). Bede forces Æthelthryth into a mould that she does not fit. By composing a hymn in praise of Æthelthryth alone out of all the abbesses, Bede bestows a unique status upon her, or rather (to use the evocative phrase of Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing) upon her ‘clean, chaste and dead body’.⁶ It is her corpse, discovered to be incorrupt in the grave when it is dug up by her successor to be moved into the church, that is the final proof of her enduring virginity:

Virginis alma caro est tumulata bis octo Nouembres,

nec putet in tumulo uirginis alma caro.

[Veiled in the tomb sixteen Novembers lay,

Nor rots her virgin flesh veiled in the tomb.]

EH 4.20, 398–9

Note the emphatic repetition of ‘virginis alma caro’ [nourishing virgin flesh] in these Latin lines (not rendered in the loose translation offered here, which inserts instead the repeated word ‘veiled’ not found in the original). There is a manifest tension between Bede’s transcendental, panegyrical poetic rendering of Æthelthryth and the more earth-bound, pragmatic prose.⁷ Yet both are part of the same prosimetrical text and neither takes precedence over, or overwrites, the other; rather the two aspects of the text counterbalance one another. Indeed, Bede’s Hymn is perhaps the opposite of the fragment: if the fragment is ‘a quotation taken out of context’, the Hymn, like Æthelthryth’s body, is safely enclosed within a larger whole, intact within its textual environment.⁸

If Bede uses Æthelthryth’s life for his own ends, is it possible still to discern elements of the underwriting and to get a sense of the ‘materials from here and there’ (EH Preface, p. 5), the narratives oral and written, that he used as his sources? Such writings and traditions would have originated in Ely itself, under the headship of Seaxburh (c. 655–c. 700), Æthelthryth’s own sister, and successor as abbess. Bede must certainly have had access to a life of the founding saint produced within her own monastery. One element that is common to Bede’s accounts of Æthelthryth and Hild of Whitby, and also, as we will see in Chapter 2, Æthelburh of Barking, is a concern with visions and miracles of death that testify to the piety of the dead and of those who wish to honour them. It is Abbess Seaxburh herself who decides that Æthelthryth’s tomb should be moved, and who sends out the monks to look for a new coffin. In initiating the translation of Æthelthryth’s body, Seaxburh is fostering her sister’s cult by announcing publically through this ritual her claim to sanctity, and thus attributing divine legitimacy to the abbey itself. Even within Bede’s narrative women have key roles to play. While the whole community, monks as well as nuns, take part in the exhumation of Æthelthryth’s corpse, it is the abbess and her sisters who open the old coffin with the intention of lifting the bones, and it is they who wash and re-clothe the body and carry it to its new resting place. Æthelthryth, who, we are told, in life did not wash herself but washed her fellow nuns, is here finally physically cleansed before being returned to the ground. This focus on the dead body of the saint, and on the roles played by her successor and the community of nuns in its translation, may well have been first memorialized by that very community.

What is so remarkable about Bede’s account of Æthelthryth, however, is the extent to which, despite the centrality to it of Seaxburh and her com...