Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100

Feminist Approaches to Early Medieval English Studies Feminist Approaches to Early Medieval English Studies , edited by Robin Norris, Rebecca Stephenson, and Renée Trilling, Knowledge Communities 12, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2023, pp. 408, €145.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9789463721462

“…The contribution that women made to the economies of their time as producers or workers of fabric have often been overlooked, but there has been a welcome reconsideration of opus feminile in recent years. 7 This revaluation has led to some consideration of the importance of women's labor by textile and art historians, 8 but there is still a need to bring this research to a wider attention within research into early medieval England and to give it equal status to other material culture, such as sculpture and metalwork which is regarded as the result of supposedly "masculine" work. Textiles were not just garments to wear; the genre also includes tablecloths, wall hangings, and other artifacts: items of prestige, given as gifts to kings and saints.…”

“…6 Publications like these, along with many others, went a long way toward legitimizing feminist criticism as a viable approach to early medieval materials-despite the fact that feminism in the academy was already on the decline within a decade of Damico and Olsen's watershed volume. 7 The belatedness of feminist criticism in early medieval studies was keenly felt by scholars in the early 1990s who saw this late acceptance as a missed opportunity for a real critical overhaul of the field. At the same time that New Readings sought to celebrate and stimulate work on women in Old English, Bennett, along with Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, expressed frustration at the field's continued resistance to feminist criticism.…”

“…For the backgrounds of the Oxford English Dictionary, research has found the male mental health patient who provided many citations, but not the many women who did the same (perhaps with less interesting back stories). 7 The OED introduction points out that Lady Craigie, wife to the editor W. A. Craigie, revised the arrangement of the entries for U in 1917-1918, but the details of her work remain unheralded. 8 Some women scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United Kingdom are maddeningly hard to identify because they are subsumed under surnames and the supposedly honorific "Miss" or "Mrs." Here I hope only to give some hints about a few of their stories, and to point the way towards how to uncover more of them.…”

“…I will refer to Bray and Brookman below. 7 See Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (London: HarperCollins, 2005). 8 For example, in addition to the work of Lady Craigie mentioned in the preface, the two women who did most of the work on Skeat's edition of AElfric's Lives of Saints, Miss Wilkinson and Miss Gunning, appear prominently in the prefaces to the dictionary fascicles.…”

“Inde Insulam Cyprum Inter Graecos Et Sarraticos (Sarracenos)…”

“…The account of the pilgrimage discussed, made between 778 and 780 was written down by a nun related to Willibald, Hugeburc of Heidenheim (Larrington, 2004;Watt, 2020). 10 This author emphasized in her work that her description is not a compilation of rumors or second-hand information, but the result of a careful analysis of the report given to her by the main protagonist of the account, who told her the story of his pilgrimage in the presence of witnesses (Limor, 2004, p. 24) 11 .…”