Royal Marriage and Conversion in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum

Abstract

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

Gendered Networks and Communicability in Medieval Historical Narratives

“…Since the 1970s, much scholarly attention has been paid to Bede's presentation of women and vastly different conclusions have been drawn. These vary from positivist approaches which saw the period as a golden age for women [14]; negative assessments which argue that Bede actively suppressed the role of women, both queens and abbesses, in his book [15,16]; and more recent studies which argue that, when Bede's HE is read alongside his far more numerous works on theology, his subtle presentation of the agency of queens in the HE becomes more apparent [17]. This article presents the preliminary results of our network analysis of Bede's HE, and our findings challenge the argument that Bede suppressed the role of women in the book.…”