Double Agents

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, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing ask, contribute to the history of women? 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.

ISBN	0812236289	Pages	264
ISBN13	9780812236286 (What's this?)	Volumes	1
Publisher	University of Pennsylvania Press	Weight (grammes)	570
Imprint	University of Pennsylvania Press	Published in	Pennsylvania
Format	Hardback	Series title	Middle Ages Series
Publication date	10 Oct 2001	Height (mm)	239
Library of Congress	PR275.R4 L	Width (mm)	162
DEWEY	829.093823	Spine width (mm)	25
DEWEY edition	DC21	Academic level	General

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
	Difference Historicized	3
	Where Are Those Women?	4
	Believing Women: Self, Psyche, Body	6
	Representation and Referentiality	9
	A Feminist Patristics?	10
1	Patristic Maternity: Bede, Hild, and Cultural Procreation	15
	Engendering Originary Narratives	17
	The Genedered Paradigm of Cultural Production	29
2	Orality, Femininity, and the Disappearing Trace in Early Anglo-Saxon England	40
	Paradigms of Absence in Anglo-Saxon Culture	40
	What's in a Name?	45
	Riddling and Renaming	54
	Chartered Territory	62
3	Literacy and Gender in Later Anglo-Saxon England	71
	Women in Dispute	72
	What's in a Name, Indeed	77
	Present Voices, Absent Names	83
	What Matter What Name?	89
	Riddles of Literacy, Riddles of Signification	92
	The Lady Reads	105
4	Figuring the Body: Gender, Performance, Hagiography	110
	Body Politics in Aldhelm's De virginitate	111
	Female Saints, Female Subjects?	125
	Seeing Women: Mary of Egypt	132
5	Pressing Hard on the "Breasts" of Scripture: Metaphor and the Symbolic	152
	When Is a Woman Not a Woman?	154
	More...

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Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England

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