Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (The Middle Ages Series) - Hardcover

Lees, Clare A.; Overing, Gillian R.

9780812236286: Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (The Middle Ages Series)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812236289 ISBN 13: 9780812236286

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001

Obviously a part of the social fabric of Anglo-Saxon England, women are nevertheless accorded an obscure and slender role in the textual archive of masculine clerical culture. What can this record of patriarchy contribute to the history of women, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing ask. Double Agents explores the meaning and implications of women's absence and presence in the partial history of Anglo-Saxon culture.

Rather than recovering the details of exceptional women's lives, Double Agents concerns itself with the formation of the cultural record itself, and with women's relation to its processes of production and reception. By revisiting many familiar issues within the scholarly tradition—orality and literacy, documentation and authenticity, sources and analogues—and by looking at some of the core authors of the period—Bede, Aldhelm, and Aelfric, who continue the intellectual traditions of the early Church fathers—Lees and Overing address woman's entry into the patristic symbolic, the order which authorizes the record itself.

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About the Author:

Clare A. Lees is the Professor of Medieval Literature and the History of the English Language at King's College, London. She is the author of Tradition and Belief: Religious Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England and editor of Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages. Gillian R. Overing is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Language, Sign, and Gender in "Beowulf" and coauthor of Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval Scandinavian World.

Review:

"An important book that encourages a healthy interdisciplinary approach to its topic and in many ways sets the terms for subsequent debate."—Medievalia et Humanistica

"Anglo-Saxonists have lagged in their exploration of contemporary theoretical issues. Double Agents fills a huge need, presenting a bold and very exciting argument and opening an as yet unarticulated conversation with Middle English studies."—Karma Lochrie, Indiana University

"The five hundred years of Anglo-Saxon England are most often ignored in current studies of gender, culture, and sexuality in Western Europe; this book repairs that neglect and illustrates how social history can be glimpsed in the cracks of the limited fragmentary evidence that survives."—Roberta Frank, Yale University

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