The Discourse of Enclosure

Representing Women in Old English Literature

Shari Horner

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780791450109, 9780791450093
• eBook ISBN: 9780791490440
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

2001 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Exploring Old English texts ranging from Beowulf to Ælfric's Lives of Saints, this book examines ways that women's monastic, material, and devotional practices in Anglo-Saxon England shaped literary representations of women and femininity. Horner argues that these representations derive from a "discourse" of female monastic enclosure, based on the increasingly strict rules of cloistered confinement that regulated the female religious body in the early Middle Ages. She shows that the female subjects of much Old English literature are enclosed by many layers—literal and figurative, textual, material, discursive, spatial—all of which image and reinforce the powerful institutions imposed by the Church on the female body. Though it has long been recognized that medieval religious women were enclosed, and that virginity was highly valued, this book is the first to consider the interrelationships of these two positions—that is, how the material practices of female monasticism inform the textual operations of Old English literature.

Table of contents

• The Discourse of Enclosure
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction: The Discourse of Enclosure: Inscribing the Feminine in Anglo-Saxon Literature
• Chapter 1: Looking Into Enclosures in the Old English Female Lyrics
• Chapter 2: Voices From the Margins: Women and Textual Enclosure in Beowulf
• Chapter 3: Textual/Sexual Violence: The Old English Juliana and the Anglo-Saxon Female Reader
• Chapter 4: Bodies and Borders: The Hermenuetics of Enclosure in Aelfric's Lives of Female Saints
• Conclusion: Christina of Markyate and Legacies of Enclosure
• Bibliography
• Index