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Abstract
This dissertation locates the socio-historical circumstances of early medieval female literacy alongside contemporary Old English poetry. Incorporating theories of feminist-cultural criticism and medieval textuality, I investigate correlations between poetic representations of women and female literacy and textuality in early medieval England.
Anglo-Saxon nuns were often active in the production and reception of literary texts. The study of their literary practices informs my readings of female characters in The Wife's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, Beowulf, and Juliana. These poems articulate a "discourse of enclosure" inscibing the confining conditions of monastic rule which governed the female religious. Virtually all female characters in OE poetry are governed by the cultural trope of enclosure. The OE "peace-weaver," in particular, is fully circumscribed, enclosed both literally and figuratively by male relatives and male language.
My study begins historically, locating evidence for female literacy in Aldhelm's De Virginitate, Bede's Historica Ecclesiastica, texts written by Anglo-Saxon missionary nuns, and Dhuoda's Liber Manualis. The conditions under which early medieval women produced literature--specifically, the monastic environment--resonate in the only two OE poems narrated by women, Wulf and Eadwacer, and The Wife's Lament. I suggest that popular forms of women's textile and textual production intersect in these vernacular lyrics to form poems inscribing both popular and monastic female cultural roles. My analyses of Beowulf and Juliana show ways in which those poems construct representations of the feminine and female textuality. I explore the intertextuality of women's stories in Beowulf, reading each story as a conscious commentary or gloss on one already told. My analysis shows that patriarchal language is the barrier that encloses the female "peace-weaver." I read Juliana as an allegory of the Christian reading process. Juliana's female body represents both the literal, carnal text, consistently misread by her pagan enemies, and the vessel containing Christian spiritual truth. In transcending her female body, she becomes masculinized (i.e. proper) reader, and only as such can she participate fully in discourse.