Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England

Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England
Author: Annie Whitehead
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2020-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526748126

The little-known lives of women who ruled, schemed, and made peace and war, between the seventh and eleventh centuries: “Meticulously researched.” —Catherine Hanley, author of Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior Many Anglo-Saxon kings are familiar. Æthelred the Unready is one—but less is written about his wife, who was consort of two kings and championed one of her sons over the others, or about his mother, who was an anointed queen and powerful regent, but was also accused of witchcraft and regicide. A royal abbess educated five bishops and was instrumental in deciding the date of Easter; another took on the might of Canterbury and Rome and was accused by the monks of fratricide. Royal mothers wielded power: Eadgifu, wife of Edward the Elder, maintained a position of authority during the reigns of both her sons. Æthelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, was a queen in all but name, while few have heard of Queen Seaxburh, who ruled Wessex, or Queen Cynethryth, who issued her own coinage. She, too, was accused of murder, and was also, like many of the royal women, literate and highly educated. Ranging from seventh-century Northumbria to eleventh-century Wessex and making extensive use of primary sources, Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England examines the lives of individual women in a way that has often been done for the Anglo-Saxon men but not for their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters.

Double Agents

Double Agents
Author: Claire A Lees
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2009-02-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1783163615

First published in 2001, Double Agents was the first book-length study of women in Anglo-Saxon written culture that took on the insights provided by contemporary critical and feminist theory, and it quickly established itself as a standard. Now available again, it complicates the exclusion of women from the historical record of Anglo-Saxon England by tackling the deeper questions behind how the feminine is modeled, used, and made metaphoric in Anglo-Saxon texts, even when the women themselves are absent.

Writing Women Saints in Anglo-Saxon England

Writing Women Saints in Anglo-Saxon England
Author: Paul E. Szarmach
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1442646128

The twelve essays in this collection advance the contemporary study of the women saints of Anglo-Saxon England by challenging received wisdom and offering alternative methodologies. The work embraces a number of different scholarly approaches, from codicological study to feminist theory. While some contributions are dedicated to the description and reconstruction of female lives of saints and their cults, others explore the broader ideological and cultural investments of the literature. The volume concentrates on four major areas: the female saint in the Old English Martyrology, genre including hagiography and homelitic writing, motherhood and chastity, and differing perspectives on lives of virgin martyrs. The essays reveal how saints' lives that exist on the apparent margins of orthodoxy actually demonstrate a successful literary challenge extending the idea of a holy life.

Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church

Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church
Author: Stephanie Hollis
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 350
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780851153179

A fresh look at the position of women in the 8th and 9th centuries as defined by the literature of the early church.

Ruling Women

Ruling Women
Author: Stacy S. Klein
Publisher:
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN:

Klein explores how queens functioned as imaginative figures in Anglo-Saxon texts as mediatory figures for negotiating sustained tensions and antagonisms among different peoples, institutions, and systems of belief.

Dress in Anglo-Saxon England

Dress in Anglo-Saxon England
Author: Gale R. Owen-Crocker
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2004
Genre: Design
ISBN: 184383572X

Splendid . . . the major overview of Anglo-Saxon clothing and textile from the 5th to 11th centuries. . . . Owen-Crocker has become the authority reconstructors call upon. . . . A wise and scholarly book. TOEBI Newsletter Based on the revised and expanded edition of 2004, this paperback is an encyclopaedic study of English dress from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, drawing evidence from archaeology, text and art (manuscripts, ivories, metalwork, stone sculpture, mosaics), and also from re-enactors' experience. It examines archaeological textiles, cloth production and the significance of imported cloth and foreign fashions. Dress is discussed as a marker of gender, ethnicity, status and social role - in the context of a pagan burial, dress for holy orders, bequests of clothing, commissioning a kingly wardrobe, and much else - and surviving dress fasteners and accessories are examined with regardto type and to geographical/chronological distribution. There are colour reconstructions of early Anglo-Saxon dress and a cutting pattern for a gown from the Bayeux tapestry; Old English garment names are discussed, and there isa glossary of costume and other relevant terms. GALE OWEN-CROCKER is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester. She has a special interest in dress throughout the medieval period - she advises ondress entries to the Toronto Old English Dictionary and has consulted for many museums and television companies. She is co-editor of the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles.

Veiled Women: The Disappearance of Nuns from Anglo-Saxon England

Veiled Women: The Disappearance of Nuns from Anglo-Saxon England
Author: Sarah Rosamund Irvine Foot
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Convents
ISBN: 9780754600435

There is no published account of the history of religious women in England before the Norman Conquest. Yet, female saints and abbesses, such as Hild of Whitby or Edith of Wilton, are among the most celebrated women recorded in Anglo-Saxon sources and their stories are of popular interest. This book offers the first general and critical assessment of female religious communities in early medieval England. It transforms our understanding of the different modes of religious vocation and institutional provision and thereby gives early medieval women's history a new foundation.

Women in Medieval England

Women in Medieval England
Author: Helen M. Jewell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1996
Genre: Civilization, Medieval
ISBN: 9780719040177

This book is about what it meant to build a city in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. It explores the physical spaces and mental attitudes that shaped lives, restructured society, and conditioned beliefs about the past and expectations for the future in the crucial German generations that formed the young Reich, fought the Great War, and experienced the Weimar Republic.Focusing on ordinary buildings and the way they shaped ordinary lives, this study shows how material space could influence the lives of citizens, from the ways the elderly slept at night to the economy of the city as a whole. It also shows how we integrate the spaces and places of our lives into our explanations of politics, culture and economics. It is aimed at those who want to understand urban modernity, Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, the use of space in social policy and politics, and the design of cities.