Table Of ContentMOTHERHOOD AND
MOTHERING IN
ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND
Mary Dockray-Miller
MOTHERHOOD AND MOTHERING
IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND
THE NEW MIDDLE AGES
BONNIE WHEELER
Series Editor
The New Middle Ages presents transdisciplinary studies of medieval
cultures. It includes both scholarly monographs and essay
collections.
PUBLISHED BY ST.MARTIN’S PRESS:
Women in the Medieval Islamic World:Power,Patronage,and Piety
edited by Gavin R.G.Hambly
The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages:On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics
by Gregory B.Stone
Presence and Presentation:Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition
by Sherry J.Mou
The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard:
Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France
by Constant J.Mews
Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault
by Philipp W.Rosemann
For Her Good Estate:The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh
by Frances Underhill
Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages
edited by Cindy L.Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl
Listening to Heloise:TheVoice of a Twelfth-Century Woman
edited by Bonnie Wheeler
Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England
by Mary Dockray-Miller
MOTHERHOOD AND
MOTHERING IN
ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND
Mary Dockray-Miller
MOTHERHOODANDMOTHERINGINANGLO-SAXONENGLAND
Copyright © Mary Dockray-Miller,2000.All rights reserved.Printed in the
United States of America.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.For information,address St.
Martin’s Press,175 Fifth Avenue,New York,N.Y.10010.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000
ISBN 978-1-349-38583-6 ISBN 978-0-312-29963-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-312-29963-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dockray-Miller,Mary,1965-
Motherhood and mothering in Anglo-Saxon England / Mary Dockray
-Miller.
p. cm.(The New Middle Ages)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-22721-3
1. Mothers—England—History—To 1500. 2. Motherhood—England-
-History—To 1500. 3. Great Britain—History—Anglo-Saxon period,
449–1066. 4. Mothers in literature. 5. Motherhood in literature.
6. English literature—Old English,ca.450–1100—History and
criticism. I. Title.
HQ759.D63 1999
306.874’3’09420902—dc21 99–39680
CIP
Design by Letra Libre,Inc.
First edition:March 2000
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the Hawk,
Edith Weatherby Dockray
CONTENTS
Series Editor’s Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
Preface: Looking for Anglo-Saxon Mothers xiii
1. Maternal Performers 1
2. Matrilineal Genealogy and Mildrib’s
Maternal Legacy 9
3. The Maternal Genealogy of Æbelflæd,
Lady of the Mercians 43
4. The Mothers of Beowulf 77
Afterword: The Politics of Motherhood 117
Appendix: Family Trees 121
Notes 125
Bibliography 149
Index 159
SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
The New Middle Agescontributes to medieval cultural studies through its
scholarly monographs and essay collections.This series speaks in a con-
temporary idiom about specific but diverse practices,expressions,and ide-
ologies in the Middle Ages;it aims especially to recuperate the histories of
medieval women.Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon Englandby Mary
Dockray-Miller is the thirteenth book in the series.This,the first mono-
graph on maternity in Anglo-Saxon England,uses a large range of diverse
evidence culled from saints’lives,chronicles,and charters to demonstrate
modes of medieval maternal nurturance. Not surprisingly, given its
grandeur and interpretive importance,Dockray-Miller uses Beowulf as her
central text.Grendel’s mother,then and now,models ways in which mater-
nity can be both powerful and thwarted.
Bonnie Wheeler
Southern Methodist University
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to many members of the community of Anglo-Saxon
scholarship for assistance withMotherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon En-
gland. I wish to thank specifically Stephanie Hollis, Paul Szarmach, and
John Hill,for their detailed and enormously helpful readings of individual
chapters;Karma Lochrie and Gillian Overing,for serving on my disserta-
tion committee and challenging me to formulate my theoretical rubric;
Nina Rulon-Miller and Michael Drout, for support and email; and the
staffs of Lambeth Palace Library and of the interlibrary loan office at
O’Neill Library of Boston College.I would like to acknowledge the edi-
tors of Women and Language, which published a modified version of the
first section of chapter 4 in the fall of 1998 as “Beowulf’s Masculine
Queen.”I would also like to thank the trustees of the British Museum,and
especially Leslie Webster of the department of Medieval and Later Antiq-
uities there,for permission to reproduce a photograph of the Franks cas-
ket on the jacket cover.My greatest professional debt is to Allen Frantzen,
who first suggested I turn my maternal thinking into a book about Anglo-
Saxon mothers,and who guided me along the way.
PREFACE
LOOKING FOR ANGLO-SAXON MOTHERS
“The personal is political”runs the much-maligned cri de coeurof the
1970s feminist movement.Yet the personal lives and circumstances
of scholars, critics, and historians influence and guide their scholarship,
criticism,and history,as postmodern theory has shown us.1 I first became
interested in mothers in Anglo-Saxon England when I became a mother
and began to wonder how mothers of a thousand years ago raised their
children,where their circumstances and problems overlapped with mine,
and how they differed.I began looking for Anglo-Saxon mothers,who,it
turned out,were not so easy to find.
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People remains the logical place
to begin an inquiry into Anglo-Saxon history,despite feminist historians’
recent observations about Bede’s neglect and distortion of the roles and ac-
tivities of women.2In AD731,“the Father of English History”completed
his text,which presents a seamless and inevitable conversion and consolida-
tion of the diverse pagan tribal kingdoms into a unified Christian England.
While Gillian Overing and Clare Lees have admirably demonstrated
Bede’s manipulation of the “maternity”of Hild of Whitby,3it is to another
saint and another double monastery in Bede’s text that I turn to elucidate
the problems inherent in a search for Anglo-Saxon mothers. In Anglo-
Saxon culture at large,both during and after Bede,patrilineage was the
focus of most extant genealogy;such a patrilineal focus was also coupled
with a usual exclusion of women’s roles and names at all,erasing and elid-
ing the biologically crucial maternal body from both the family tree and
the historical focus.
In book four,Bede’s History celebrates the monastery of Ely,founded
and ruled by the virgin St.Æbeldryb.Ely demonstrates a matrilineal rather
than a patrilineal succession,but Bede does not inform his readers of this
unusual genealogy.Rather,he focuses on Æbeldryb’s virginity and piety
before revealing almost inadvertantly that her sister Seaxburh was her suc-
cessor as abbess.His main focus is not “sororal succession”at all but instead
Seaxburh’s orchestration of Æbeldryb’s translation.4 Readers of Bede’s
