An entry in the Women Medievalists and the Academy collection, this brief biography presents Cambridge historian Mary Bateson, scholar and suffragist, who lived on the cusp of the opportunity for academic professionalization for women. Her life illustrates an inspiring blend of serious scholarship, accessible publication, and devoted political…[Read more]

Traditional equation of women with the feminine and men with the masculine is disrupted when Beowulf is read within the rubric of gender performance as determined by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. Performativity enables a new way of interpreting the characters of Beowulf; specifically, in the world of the poem masculinity…[Read more]

Throughout the Christian era, literary and artistic representations of the Virgin Mary have been manipulated by a variety of ideologies, religious or political, to define the appropriate positioning and agency of the feminine in a culture. The culture of Anglo-Saxon England, like most others, almost always presented Mary in positive terms,…[Read more]

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;…[Read more]

Feminist and gender scholars working in Anglo-Saxon studies in the past ten years have been asking new and important questions of a variety of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Most crucially, this interdisciplinary new work redefines the historiographical paradigms of Anglo-Saxon cultural production and reception so that women must now be…[Read more]

This essay analyzes the illustration sequences of the four magnificent Gospel books made for Judith of Flanders within the context of the political chaos in pre-Conquest England. These deluxe display books indicate one of the ways that literacy and literary patronage provided cultural legitimacy and social status for secular women in the late…[Read more]