MOTHERHOOD AND MOTHERING IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

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1 MOTHERHOOD AND MOTHERING IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

2 THE NEW MIDDLE AGES BONNIE WHEELER Series Editor The New Middle Ages presents transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures. It includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections. PUBLISHED BY ST. MARTIN S PRESS: Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio s Poetaphysics by Gregory B. Stone Presence and Presentation:Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition by Sherry J. Mou The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France by Constant J. Mews Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault by Philipp W. Rosemann For Her Good Estate:The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh by Frances Underhill Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl Listening to Heloise:TheVoice of a Twelfth-Century Woman edited by Bonnie Wheeler Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Dockray-Miller

3 MOTHERHOOD AND MOTHERING IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND Mary Dockray-Miller

4 MOTHERHOOD AND MOTHERING IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND Copyright Mary Dockray-Miller, All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dockray-Miller, Mary, Motherhood and mothering in Anglo-Saxon England / Mary Dockray -Miller. p. cm. (The New Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Mothers England History To Motherhood England- -History To Great Britain History Anglo-Saxon period, Mothers in literature. 5. Motherhood in literature. 6. English literature Old English, ca History and criticism. I. Title. HQ759.D dc CIP Design by Letra Libre, Inc. First edition: March

5 For the Hawk, Edith Weatherby Dockray

6 CONTENTS Series Editor s Foreword ix Acknowledgments xi Preface: Looking for Anglo-Saxon Mothers xiii 1. Maternal Performers 1 2. Matrilineal Genealogy and Mildrib s Maternal Legacy 9 3. The Maternal Genealogy of Æbelflæd, Lady of the Mercians The Mothers of Beowulf 77 Afterword: The Politics of Motherhood 117 Appendix: Family Trees 121 Notes 125 Bibliography 149 Index 159

7 SERIES EDITOR S FOREWORD The New Middle Ages contributes to medieval cultural studies through its scholarly monographs and essay collections.this series speaks in a contemporary idiom about specific but diverse practices, expressions, and ideologies in the Middle Ages; it aims especially to recuperate the histories of medieval women. Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Dockray-Miller is the thirteenth book in the series. This, the first monograph on maternity in Anglo-Saxon England, uses a large range of diverse evidence culled from saints lives, chronicles, and charters to demonstrate modes of medieval maternal nurturance. Not surprisingly, given its grandeur and interpretive importance, Dockray-Miller uses Beowulf as her central text. Grendel s mother, then and now, models ways in which maternity can be both powerful and thwarted. Bonnie Wheeler Southern Methodist University

8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to many members of the community of Anglo-Saxon scholarship for assistance with Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England. I wish to thank specifically Stephanie Hollis, Paul Szarmach, and John Hill, for their detailed and enormously helpful readings of individual chapters; Karma Lochrie and Gillian Overing, for serving on my dissertation committee and challenging me to formulate my theoretical rubric; Nina Rulon-Miller and Michael Drout, for support and ; and the staffs of Lambeth Palace Library and of the interlibrary loan office at O Neill Library of Boston College. I would like to acknowledge the editors of Women and Language, which published a modified version of the first section of chapter 4 in the fall of 1998 as Beowulf s Masculine Queen. I would also like to thank the trustees of the British Museum, and especially Leslie Webster of the department of Medieval and Later Antiquities there, for permission to reproduce a photograph of the Franks casket on the jacket cover. My greatest professional debt is to Allen Frantzen, who first suggested I turn my maternal thinking into a book about Anglo- Saxon mothers, and who guided me along the way.

9 PREFACE LOOKING FOR ANGLO-SAXON MOTHERS he personal is political runs the much-maligned cri de coeur of the T1970s feminist movement.yet the personal lives and circumstances of scholars, critics, and historians influence and guide their scholarship, criticism, and history, as postmodern theory has shown us. 1 I first became interested in mothers in Anglo-Saxon England when I became a mother and began to wonder how mothers of a thousand years ago raised their children, where their circumstances and problems overlapped with mine, and how they differed. I began looking for Anglo-Saxon mothers, who, it turned out, were not so easy to find. Bede s Ecclesiastical History of the English People remains the logical place to begin an inquiry into Anglo-Saxon history, despite feminist historians recent observations about Bede s neglect and distortion of the roles and activities of women. 2 In AD 731, the Father of English History completed his text, which presents a seamless and inevitable conversion and consolidation of the diverse pagan tribal kingdoms into a unified Christian England. While Gillian Overing and Clare Lees have admirably demonstrated Bede s manipulation of the maternity of Hild of Whitby, 3 it is to another saint and another double monastery in Bede s text that I turn to elucidate the problems inherent in a search for Anglo-Saxon mothers. In Anglo- Saxon culture at large, both during and after Bede, patrilineage was the focus of most extant genealogy; such a patrilineal focus was also coupled with a usual exclusion of women s roles and names at all, erasing and eliding the biologically crucial maternal body from both the family tree and the historical focus. In book four, Bede s History celebrates the monastery of Ely, founded and ruled by the virgin St. Æbeldryb. Ely demonstrates a matrilineal rather than a patrilineal succession, but Bede does not inform his readers of this unusual genealogy. Rather, he focuses on Æbeldryb s virginity and piety before revealing almost inadvertantly that her sister Seaxburh was her successor as abbess. His main focus is not sororal succession at all but instead Seaxburh s orchestration of Æbeldryb s translation. 4 Readers of Bede s

10 xiv MOTHERHOOD AND MOTHERING canonical, primary text are not informed that Seaxburh was succeeded by her daughter Eormenhild, who was succeeded by her daughter Werburh, a genealogy that demonstrates a transmission of power and property from sister to sister and mother to daughter through four abbesses and three generations. 5 While I will be discussing the maternal genealogy of Ely in much greater detail in chapter 2, I want to emphasize here that Bede and/or his sources did not think this maternal genealogy worthy of inclusion in the national history. Bede s exclusion of the maternal genealogy of Ely is indicative of the place of mothers in Anglo-Saxon texts typically, they have no place. The little-known successive abbacies of Seaxburh, Eormenhild, and Werburh show us that Anglo-Saxon mothers are traditionally excluded and hidden but that they can be found. And they can tell us, ultimately, about motherhood and mothers in our own culture as well as in theirs.

REPRESENTING RAPE IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN LITERATURE

REPRESENTING RAPE IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN LITERATURE THE NEW MIDDLE AGES BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages presents transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures. It includes both