The Discourse of Enclosure
Representing Women in Old English Literature
Description:... Exploring Old English texts ranging from Beowulf to Ælfrics Lives of Saints, this book examines ways that womens 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 layersliteral and figurative, textual, material, discursive, spatialall 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 positionsthat is, how the material practices of female monasticism inform the textual operations of Old English literature.
Show description