Like most female characters in Old English poetry, Judith from the Old English poem of the same name has been subject to much scrutiny in recent years. She has been read as a figure of Mother Church, or as a Germanic warrior, or as a warning against rape. Yet Judith’s relationship with her maid, the focus of my analysis of Judith, has been elided; the maid is the key to Judith’s gender performance when both contemporary theory and traditional philology are brought to bear on the section of the text where the maid appears. The maid and Judith create a cooperative female community of women, wherein Judith is a maternal figure; that female community constructs a heroism for Judith that is based on protection and generation rather than aggression and domination.