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

Abstract

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.

A brief history of Anglo‐Saxon education

“…The description of the curriculum above, then, applies to female religious as much as male, and recent scholarship has taken more account of women's contributions to Anglo‐Saxon intellectual culture. The rich tradition of scholarship on Anglo‐Saxon women cannot be chronicled in an essay of this length (though see Dockray‐Miller, , for an overview), but in the field of education, pioneering work in the 90s like Damico and Olson () and Hollis () opened the door for later studies, like Foot () and Harris ().…”