Historical sources of the Middle English verse life of St. AEthelthryth

Historical source study of the last text in the composite manuscript Lon- don, BL Cotton Faustina B.iii can shed light on the transmission and use of chronicle texts and their translations in late medieval England. The author of the Middle English verse Life of St. Æthelthryth used John Trevisa’s English translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon rather than the Latin text as the primary source for the historical section of the Life (lines 1–110)

Old English Literature and Feminist Theory: A State of the Field

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 regularly included in discussions of Anglo-Saxon cultural agency. This paradigm shift can and should inform broader cultural understandings of the history of gender relations, despite current communication problems among the varied subfields of medieval studies and gender studies. Furthermore, the pedagogy of both medievalists and faculty specializing in later periods must be informed by this shift as well

The Maternal Performance of the Virgin Mary in the Old English Advent

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, celebrating her for humility, purity, and passivity. In the Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book, however, Mary’s ideal and idealized femininity does occasionally reveal its precarious underpinnings in metaphor and in its need to disempower the Mother. Analysis of the metaphors and diction that refer to Mary, especially in lyric nine, reveals her as a necessarily female, maternally embodied, active subject in spite of the text’s traditional figurative language. This reading as well permits twenty-first-century scholars to expand our understanding of the possible audiences of the poem to include professed religious women associated with Exeter Cathedral

Feminine Preoccupations: English at the Seven Sisters

This essay examines some of the curricular and pedagogical practices in place in English departments during the early years of the "Seven Sisters" -- the women's colleges of the late nineteenth century -- to address contemporary issues in English studies. The experimental nature of the woman's college allowed for pedagogical innovation, so that the "feminine preoccupation" of literary study as understood in the postmodern era was fostered in the collaborative atmosphere of the women's colleges of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

The Middle English Verse of Boston Public Library MS 124

Abstract: This short edition makes available for the first time three Middle English verse prayers to Christ from the Mohun Hours, a fourteenth-century Book of Hours held by the Boston Public Library (MS 124). Late medieval Books of Hours have received substantial recent critical attention as expressions of devotional literacy practiced mainly by secular, aristocratic women. These Books of Hours can be unique in their decorations and their compilations of prayers and texts beyond the core of the Office of the Little Hours of the Virgin; the women who owned, commissioned, used, and added to these books are thus responsible for the preservation of a huge number of devotional texts. The three Middle English prayers are introduced and contextualized, then presented in both Middle English and modern English translation

Beowulf's Tears of Fatherhood

The figure of Hrothgar, aging king of the Danes, forces an analysis of the relationships among age, maleness, and masculinity in Beowulf. Masculine characters, while enacting the poem's complex reciprocities and social transactions in the hall and on the battlefield, accrue status and power through assertions of control and dominance, through knowledge and use of the rituals of hierarchy, and through manipulation of the variety of relationships that exists in the social world of Beowulf. Two specific incidents within the text exhibit Hrothgar's growing inability to exert power over others and to enact this masculine heroic ethos. The first is heterosexual, a departure to and return from his wife's bed; the second is homosocial, his leave-taking of Beowulf