English Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Medieval European Literature - Literary Criticism, Medieval History - Social Aspects, 1066-1485 (Medieval Period) - British Hi
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Overview
Exploring Old English texts ranging from Beowulf to Aelfric's Lives of Saints, this book examines ways that women's monastic, material, and devotional practices in Anglo-Saxon England shaped literary representations of women and femininity. Horner argues that these representations derive from a "discourse" of female monastic enclosure, based on the increasingly strict rules of cloistered confinement that regulated the female religious body in the early Middle Ages. She shows that the female subjects of much Old English literature are enclosed by many layers - literal and figurative, textual, material, discursive, and spatial - all of which image and reinforce the powerful institutions imposed by the Church on the female body. Though it has long been recognized that medieval religious women were enclosed, and that virginity was highly valued, this book is the first to consider the interrelationships of these two positions - that is, how the material practices of female monasticism inform the textual operations of Old English literature.Editorials
Booknews
Descriptions of the often sexual in nature violence against female saints are not for the squeamish, but medieval readers understood what pagan torturers did not: that these women were among the select few that could transcend such violation. Exploring Old English texts ranging from to , Horner (English, Shippensburg U.) not only analyzes women's devotional practices in Anglo-Saxon England and period literary representations of femininity, but also links the ideological enclosure of cloistered women with the premium put on virginity. The author concludes that these models of female enclosure prefigured the surge of women's literature and spirituality in the later Middle Ages. Includes an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Book Details
Published
September 18, 2009
Publisher
State University of New York Press
ISBN
9780791490440