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Women and Englishness: Anglo-Saxon Female Saints in the South English Legendary

Saint Æthelthryth of Ely from the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, illuminated manuscript in the British LibraryWomen and Englishness: Anglo-Saxon Female Saints in the South English Legendary

By Kerryn Olsen

Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, Volume 19 (2013)

Abstract: A growing interest in ideas of group identity, especially with regards to the development of nationhood, has seen some very interesting works on early English identity. However, women and their role in creation of ideas of identity have largely been ignored. This article attempts to redress this balance, by focusing on one of the early collections of saints’ lives found in Middle English, the South English Legendary. Three Anglo-Saxon female saints’ lives are found in three of the extant manuscripts, and the lives are examined to see if the acts of identity performed through these texts are noticeably different from their male counterparts. The ownership and readership of the manuscripts are also briefly considered, in order to understand the impact of such lives on the audience.

Introduction: The inhabitants of the land currently called England have identified themselves as English from at least around the time of King Alfred. This identity seems to owe much to two particular instances in English history: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, wherein he outlined the traits of an English church, and King Alfred’s nostalgic re-imagining of a unified country. What is more surprising is that English identity survived the Norman Conquest, survived the replacement of the English nobility with Norman invaders, and eventually encompassed the Normans themselves, to the point that they became selfdescribed as English, and this despite the fact that some English people today still claim descent from the Norman invasion. Hugh M. Thomas provides an in-depth study of the various processes involved with assimilation, and points out that the survival of ‘English’ as the identity for the inhabitants of England is a complex issue. He comes to the conclusion that while ‘[t]he construction of identity did get bound up in politics in medieval England, […] there is no evidence of any effort by kings or political elites to impose English identity. Instead it moved upwards, and the kings were the last to become thoroughly English after 1066.’ This upward momentum goes against commonly accepted theories of identity, where the mother-tongue might be retained for use at home, while the language of the elite is that used for business and governance. Thomas provides a plausible reason for how the English went against the trend, pointing to the English Church:

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If any group can be described as the Traditionskern [‘nucleus of tradition’] of English identity in the post-conquest period, it was the English clergy. […] [A] number of clerical and monastic writers seized control of the ethnic discourse by preserving English traditions and defending English honour. Many of these writers were demonstrably of at least partial English ancestry, and the survival of many natives in the church gave them a favourable environment in which to work. […] I would argue that the English religious, working as prestigious insiders within the church, were […] crucial to the survival and spread of English identity.

These clerical writers include chroniclers such as William of Malmesbury (c.1090- 1143), who had “the blood of both nations in [his] veins”; Henry of Huntingdon (c.1088- 1156), who was also of mixed parentage; and Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1155); and hagiographers such as the Flemish Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c.1040-1114) and the English Osbert of Clare (d.1158).8 Of these, only Goscelin of Saint-Bertin was a true immigrant; while the others may have been influenced by their upbringing, and those of mixed parentage may have been influenced particularly by the role of their mother and the mother-tongue in the development of their own identity, they were still writing within and for a primarily Norman elite. Chroniclers and hagiographers had different foci in their works, but both groups were (re-)presenting and reiterating a positive idea of England.

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Click here to read this article from Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies

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