Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh (‘The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill’) is a medieval Irish text, telling how an army under the leadership of Brian Boru challenged Viking invaders and their allies in Ireland, culminating with the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. Brian’s victory is widely remembered for breaking Viking power in Ireland, although much modern scholarship disputes traditional perceptions. Instead of an international conflict between Irish and Viking, interpretations based on revisionist scholarship consider it a domestic feud or civil war. Counter-revisionists challenge this view and a long-standing and lively debate continues. Here, we introduce quantitative measures to the discussions. We present statistical analyses of network data embedded in the text to position its sets of interactions on a spectrum from the domestic to the international. This delivers a picture that lies between antipodal traditional and revisionist extremes; hostilities recorded in the text are mostly between Irish and Viking—but internal conflict forms a significant proportion of the negative interactions too.

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The prevailing view in modern scholarship is that Bede reduced the role of women in his narrative of Anglo-Saxon conversion, in contrast to Gregory of Tours with whom Bede is unfavourably compared. In Gregory's account of the conversion of Clovis, king of the Franks, he allowed an overt role for the king's wife, Clotild, whereas in Bede's presentation of mixed marriages between Christian queens and pagan kings his queens did not actively convert their husbands. This essay presents a counter thesis arguing that the importance of Christian queens can be detected in Bede's Historia when attention is paid to scriptural imagery and exegetical allusions in his text. Bede's Historia is the only early source that refers to Christian queens at pagan courts and his presentation indicates that these women fulfilled scriptural precepts such as 1 Cor. 7:14, 'the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife'. This theological dimension reveals the unique role played by Christian queens in the conversion of their husbands and the significance of royal marriages in the acceptance of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England. Our knowledge and understanding of the range and scope of medieval women's lives has dramatically expanded in the last thirty or so years, with a marked increase in the number of studies devoted to women alongside more general developments in gender history. Analyses of women in Bede's Historia ecclesiatica have drawn a wide variety of conclusions: from glowing accounts suggesting conversion-era Anglo-Saxon England was something of an idyll

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