Books by Kathryn Maude
https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781843845966/addressing-women-in-early-medieval-religious-texts/
... more https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781843845966/addressing-women-in-early-medieval-religious-texts/
An investigation into texts specifically addressed to women sheds new light on female literary cultures.
From the tenth to the twelfth centuries in England and Scotland we have scant evidence of women's writing. How, then, can we access these women's experiences?
This book argues that by analysing texts deliberately written forand addressed directly to women we gain an insight into the horizons of possibility for their lives. It examines religious texts addressed to women, bringing together works that are more widely studied with others that are less well known, and demonstrates continuities across Old English and Latin texts written for female readers and patrons across the Conquest period. Case studies, ranging from Ælfric's sermons to Aelred's De institutione inclusarum, from the Life of Christina of Markyate to Goscelin's saints' lives for Wilton and Barking Abbeys, attend to the intimate scripts women were encouraged to inhabit through a close focus on the form of the textual address.By concentrating on address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.
Articles by Kathryn Maude
At King's, part of our interest in the "creative medieval" is of course driven by a desire to inc... more At King's, part of our interest in the "creative medieval" is of course driven by a desire to increase the appeal of medieval studies among students, but we are also interested in the history of creativity in medieval studies, which we feel has often been overlooked. Translation and performance are at the heart of Anglo-Saxon Studies. A teacher of Old English needs to develop pedagogic skills to ensure that students feel comfortable taking creative risks—whether that is venturing a new translation, or simply voicing an unfamiliar word. So one of the aims of the projects described in this essay was to encourage early career researchers and teachers to think about how creativity is threaded through their academic practice. Another, broader, aim of the Spiral, was to invite the public at large to consider how the early medieval is threaded through the contemporary.
Papers by Kathryn Maude
This is an edition and translation of Berhtgyth's late-eighth century letters to her brother Balt... more This is an edition and translation of Berhtgyth's late-eighth century letters to her brother Balthard. You can also find the edition published in the Medieval Feminist Forum here: http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2105&context=mff
Magistra, 21.1, Jul 2015
I start this article with an analysis of Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius, the letter of love and ... more I start this article with an analysis of Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius, the letter of love and spiritual longing that he wrote to Eve when she left Wilton to become a recluse on the continent. He imagines Eve in total physical seclusion, but surrounded by the community at Wilton and bound tightly to him through reading his words. I then move on to Hilary of Orleans’ poem written about Eve after her death. Again, Hilary describes Eve as solitary and living the life of a recluse, but appears to contradict himself when he describes her lifelong ‘partnership’ with Hervé. Finally, I address Eve in scholarship – is it possible for us to see her alone when she has not written herself? It seems that whenever we research her we see her through the eyes of a group of men who knew her, rather than in her own right.
Higher Education Research Network Journal, Jun 2014
This essay investigates the difficulties of introducing the medieval to first year undergraduate ... more This essay investigates the difficulties of introducing the medieval to first year undergraduate English students. Given their characterisations of people’s mindset in the Middle Ages as ‘irrational’, ‘gullible’ and ‘unsophisticated’, I attempted to challenge these views and put across a nuanced view of the medieval period. This was particularly important as for many students this was their first encounter with medieval texts. In this reflective case study I discuss the problems I faced in the classroom when attempting to teach students medieval texts, and evaluate the teaching strategies that I used to deal with them.
This article draws on my experience both as a medievalist and as a feminist working in a UK unive... more This article draws on my experience both as a medievalist and as a feminist working in a UK university today to discuss the challenges facing feminist academia more widely. Using Medieval Studies as a case study, this article argues that in times of austerity the pressure on early career feminist academics to conform is greater as it is increasingly important to get one's work published in order to stay competitive. This pressure to publish limits intellectual curiosity and forces research down more conventional paths. This article lays out how this functions in Medieval Studies and attempts to suggest some ways in which it could be overcome. One strategy of resistance I suggest entails what I call an ‘ethics of source study’; a way of looking at and responding to both medieval and modern texts with an awareness of their potential effect on the world. I begin by discussing the pressing need to publish work forced upon us by the Research Excellence Framework, and how this drive towards publication can make our work less radical. I then illustrate this with examples from my own discipline. In Medieval Studies, the publication of more articles means that the production of editions is neglected, and this forces scholars to use out-of-date and misogynist editions. Finally, I suggest some ideas of how we can create alternative networks in which feminist academia can survive and flourish, including an outline of what an ethics of source study might look like.
Blogposts by Kathryn Maude
Blogpost on the history of sexuality for Notches Blog:
Aelred’s text challenges a strict binary v... more Blogpost on the history of sexuality for Notches Blog:
Aelred’s text challenges a strict binary view of sexual desire and temptation in a way that was unusual at the time, as well as today, and gives us a fascinating insight into his understanding of the similarities between male and female experiences of sex and sexual desire.
Whether we look to the visual arts, novels, poems or indeed plays, it is becoming evident just ho... more Whether we look to the visual arts, novels, poems or indeed plays, it is becoming evident just how often contemporary women’s culture offers us new resources for understanding the culture of women in the medieval past.
Conference Presentations by Kathryn Maude
Grand historical narratives about the medieval period often have a gendered dynamic that treats m... more Grand historical narratives about the medieval period often have a gendered dynamic that treats men as typical and ordinary, with work on women as an extra or add-on. Painstakingly reintroducing women into the masculinist narrative has not fully addressed this problem, as they are still portrayed as secondary rather than originary. Instead, working collaboratively across time and place enables us to create new histories of medieval phenomena that include women from the outset.
Focussing on the problematic historical discourse around female enclosure in the Middle Ages, this collaborative paper attempts to model a new way of working across different fields, disciplines, and time-periods to create an integrated historiography. It has been assumed that women who took religious orders were strictly enclosed in monasteries against their will. Comparing eleventh- century English nuns with thirteenth-century east-central European nuns, we show that there is no normal discourse of enclosure that women cleaved to or deviated from.
Via a joint assault on the assumptions and generalisations that have shaped modern understandings of enclosure, this paper will reveal the multiplicity of gendered ways in which women interacted with enclosure as a discourse. It will also argue for the importance of collaborative enquiry as a way of deconstructing the scholarly narratives that homogenise women’s religious experiences and subordinate them to those of male religious.
In Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints there is a strong focus on female virginity. Æl... more In Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints there is a strong focus on female virginity. Ælfric was involved, through his teacher Æthelwold, with the ideological project of the Benedictine Reform, which championed Æthelthryth. This female virgin saint was central to the reform and so it would seem logical that she would have a central place in his didactic projects. However, this is not the case. She is treated with caution in his works and given less attention than other female virginal figures such as the female Roman martyr saints. Significantly, Æthelthryth is dead for most of her Life, and given no agency to decide upon and act out her own decisions.
I argue that this absence from her own story is because Æthelthryth enacts a transgressive virginity. While the virgin martyr saints are both geographically and temporally far from Ælfric and therefore their threatened virginities serve to uphold rather than shake the status quo, Æthelthryth’s virginity is transgressive because she is too close to Ælfric in time, class and geographical area. Her behaviour in life to protect her virginity makes her an unsuitable role model, as she left her husband in order to pursue her calling as a nun. This transgresses the easy symbolic possibilities of the virgin martyr saints, as they symbolise the triumph of Christianity in dark times just as the Benedictine Reform is in the process of triumphing over backward elements in the English church. The virgin martyrs are ideal figures of virginity threatened by immoderate lust, in a way that Æthelthryth is not, and so the virgin martyrs are more conceptually useful as didactic tools.
The Encomium Emmae Reginae is a text commissioned by Queen Emma around 1041. Its author, an anony... more The Encomium Emmae Reginae is a text commissioned by Queen Emma around 1041. Its author, an anonymous monk of St-Bertin in Flanders referred to by modern scholars as the Encomiast, states that it is designed to honour Emma and her connections. Rather than beginning with a genealogy and focussing on Emma's forebears, as we might expect from this description, the Encomium opens with a portrait of Emma enthroned in state, receiving a copy of the work from its composer, as you can see. [CLICK -slide with portrait] This is the first portrait of a crowned English queen and it situates her as a locus of patronage and secular power, ruling alongside her two sons, Harthacnut and Edward. I will return to the importance of this portrait later in my presentation. In the text that follows this image, the Encomiast rewrites the story of the recent past in order to create Emma's identity as the matriarch of a new dynasty.
Book Reviews by Kathryn Maude
For full review see: https://networks.h-net.org/node/6056/reviews/92853/maude-mills-seeing-sodomy... more For full review see: https://networks.h-net.org/node/6056/reviews/92853/maude-mills-seeing-sodomy-middle-ages
In the early fifteenth century, the three de Limbourg brothers illustrated a lavish book of hours for Jean de France, Duc de Berry. This devotional manuscript includes a miniature of St. Jerome in which he is tricked into donning female attire. The saint is shown in church wearing a long, blue, figure-hugging dress, being discussed by two watching monks. It is from this image of St. Jerome that Robert Mills begins his wide-ranging discussion of sodomitical sin in the Middle Ages. Mills notes that, despite attempts to uncouple sexuality and gender in some modes of political activism, to a “twenty-first century viewer, conditioned by long-standing associations between gender-variant behaviour and sexual dissidence, it may well look as though the gossiping monks are being covertly homophobic” (p. 2). Jerome’s effeminate dress, in this reading, is a sign of his homosexuality. Through a nuanced close reading of the medieval context, Mills argues instead that the attempt to associate Jerome with the fleshly bodies of women “would have been interpreted as an attack on Jerome’s chastity” (p. 6). This kind of destabilizing analysis is typical of Mills’s impressive book, which combines theoretical insights with attentive close reading of texts, images, and material culture.
Feeling Women's Liberation is an ambitious attempt to explore the rhetorical construction of the ... more Feeling Women's Liberation is an ambitious attempt to explore the rhetorical construction of the women's liberation movement in the 1970s and how it was remembered at the turn of the 21st century.
Talks by Kathryn Maude
Summer 2015 saw vast numbers of refugees arriving at Europe’s borders, with shocking images and h... more Summer 2015 saw vast numbers of refugees arriving at Europe’s borders, with shocking images and headlines making the front pages daily. After a general election fought on issues of national security and immigration – the current articulation of a strain of racism which runs very deeply in English national culture – the public declarations of sympathy and solidarity for these refugees were a welcome antidote to the embedded xenophobia in the national imaginary. In the context of this outpouring of sentiment and widespread (though by no means hegemonic) desire to welcome Syrian refugees – sometimes literally into people’s own homes – myths about the English nation began to circulate. One of the most potent of these myths was the idea that the English ethos is inherently multicultural, that ‘We Are All Migrants’. This paper problematises this idea, exploring the implications of applying modern terminology to earlier movements of people; the mobilisation of the Middle Ages - and the Anglo-Saxons in particular - in service of liberal teleologies; and demonstrates that the amnesiac impulse motivating this ahistorical narrative is a desire for multiculturalism untethered to Empire.
In 2013 we—a group of postgraduate students from King’s College London—held a public engagement e... more In 2013 we—a group of postgraduate students from King’s College London—held a public engagement event in a single room of an art gallery in Finsbury Park in north London. Our interest in Old English extends from the purely semantic to the historical to the poetic, and so we decided to create a visual, interactive ‘Wordhord’. We could easily come up with a list of our favourite words but we wanted to involve a wider community of Anglo-Saxon enthusiasts. We asked people to send us their favourite words of Old English via various social networks, and received responses from specialists as well as people who had picked up some Old English in required literature classes as undergraduates. On the day of the event, we opened the doors of the gallery to the public and provided them with paint, brushes, and a blank wall. A number of projects have grown out of this one, including an Old English Word-of-the-Day blog and Twitter account, as well as a collaborative event at the Museum of Water at Somerset House. In this roundtable discussion we considered the opportunities that academics have to share their passion for Old English with the public.
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Books by Kathryn Maude
An investigation into texts specifically addressed to women sheds new light on female literary cultures.
From the tenth to the twelfth centuries in England and Scotland we have scant evidence of women's writing. How, then, can we access these women's experiences?
This book argues that by analysing texts deliberately written forand addressed directly to women we gain an insight into the horizons of possibility for their lives. It examines religious texts addressed to women, bringing together works that are more widely studied with others that are less well known, and demonstrates continuities across Old English and Latin texts written for female readers and patrons across the Conquest period. Case studies, ranging from Ælfric's sermons to Aelred's De institutione inclusarum, from the Life of Christina of Markyate to Goscelin's saints' lives for Wilton and Barking Abbeys, attend to the intimate scripts women were encouraged to inhabit through a close focus on the form of the textual address.By concentrating on address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.
Articles by Kathryn Maude
Papers by Kathryn Maude
Blogposts by Kathryn Maude
Aelred’s text challenges a strict binary view of sexual desire and temptation in a way that was unusual at the time, as well as today, and gives us a fascinating insight into his understanding of the similarities between male and female experiences of sex and sexual desire.
Conference Presentations by Kathryn Maude
Focussing on the problematic historical discourse around female enclosure in the Middle Ages, this collaborative paper attempts to model a new way of working across different fields, disciplines, and time-periods to create an integrated historiography. It has been assumed that women who took religious orders were strictly enclosed in monasteries against their will. Comparing eleventh- century English nuns with thirteenth-century east-central European nuns, we show that there is no normal discourse of enclosure that women cleaved to or deviated from.
Via a joint assault on the assumptions and generalisations that have shaped modern understandings of enclosure, this paper will reveal the multiplicity of gendered ways in which women interacted with enclosure as a discourse. It will also argue for the importance of collaborative enquiry as a way of deconstructing the scholarly narratives that homogenise women’s religious experiences and subordinate them to those of male religious.
I argue that this absence from her own story is because Æthelthryth enacts a transgressive virginity. While the virgin martyr saints are both geographically and temporally far from Ælfric and therefore their threatened virginities serve to uphold rather than shake the status quo, Æthelthryth’s virginity is transgressive because she is too close to Ælfric in time, class and geographical area. Her behaviour in life to protect her virginity makes her an unsuitable role model, as she left her husband in order to pursue her calling as a nun. This transgresses the easy symbolic possibilities of the virgin martyr saints, as they symbolise the triumph of Christianity in dark times just as the Benedictine Reform is in the process of triumphing over backward elements in the English church. The virgin martyrs are ideal figures of virginity threatened by immoderate lust, in a way that Æthelthryth is not, and so the virgin martyrs are more conceptually useful as didactic tools.
Book Reviews by Kathryn Maude
In the early fifteenth century, the three de Limbourg brothers illustrated a lavish book of hours for Jean de France, Duc de Berry. This devotional manuscript includes a miniature of St. Jerome in which he is tricked into donning female attire. The saint is shown in church wearing a long, blue, figure-hugging dress, being discussed by two watching monks. It is from this image of St. Jerome that Robert Mills begins his wide-ranging discussion of sodomitical sin in the Middle Ages. Mills notes that, despite attempts to uncouple sexuality and gender in some modes of political activism, to a “twenty-first century viewer, conditioned by long-standing associations between gender-variant behaviour and sexual dissidence, it may well look as though the gossiping monks are being covertly homophobic” (p. 2). Jerome’s effeminate dress, in this reading, is a sign of his homosexuality. Through a nuanced close reading of the medieval context, Mills argues instead that the attempt to associate Jerome with the fleshly bodies of women “would have been interpreted as an attack on Jerome’s chastity” (p. 6). This kind of destabilizing analysis is typical of Mills’s impressive book, which combines theoretical insights with attentive close reading of texts, images, and material culture.
Talks by Kathryn Maude
An investigation into texts specifically addressed to women sheds new light on female literary cultures.
From the tenth to the twelfth centuries in England and Scotland we have scant evidence of women's writing. How, then, can we access these women's experiences?
This book argues that by analysing texts deliberately written forand addressed directly to women we gain an insight into the horizons of possibility for their lives. It examines religious texts addressed to women, bringing together works that are more widely studied with others that are less well known, and demonstrates continuities across Old English and Latin texts written for female readers and patrons across the Conquest period. Case studies, ranging from Ælfric's sermons to Aelred's De institutione inclusarum, from the Life of Christina of Markyate to Goscelin's saints' lives for Wilton and Barking Abbeys, attend to the intimate scripts women were encouraged to inhabit through a close focus on the form of the textual address.By concentrating on address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.
Aelred’s text challenges a strict binary view of sexual desire and temptation in a way that was unusual at the time, as well as today, and gives us a fascinating insight into his understanding of the similarities between male and female experiences of sex and sexual desire.
Focussing on the problematic historical discourse around female enclosure in the Middle Ages, this collaborative paper attempts to model a new way of working across different fields, disciplines, and time-periods to create an integrated historiography. It has been assumed that women who took religious orders were strictly enclosed in monasteries against their will. Comparing eleventh- century English nuns with thirteenth-century east-central European nuns, we show that there is no normal discourse of enclosure that women cleaved to or deviated from.
Via a joint assault on the assumptions and generalisations that have shaped modern understandings of enclosure, this paper will reveal the multiplicity of gendered ways in which women interacted with enclosure as a discourse. It will also argue for the importance of collaborative enquiry as a way of deconstructing the scholarly narratives that homogenise women’s religious experiences and subordinate them to those of male religious.
I argue that this absence from her own story is because Æthelthryth enacts a transgressive virginity. While the virgin martyr saints are both geographically and temporally far from Ælfric and therefore their threatened virginities serve to uphold rather than shake the status quo, Æthelthryth’s virginity is transgressive because she is too close to Ælfric in time, class and geographical area. Her behaviour in life to protect her virginity makes her an unsuitable role model, as she left her husband in order to pursue her calling as a nun. This transgresses the easy symbolic possibilities of the virgin martyr saints, as they symbolise the triumph of Christianity in dark times just as the Benedictine Reform is in the process of triumphing over backward elements in the English church. The virgin martyrs are ideal figures of virginity threatened by immoderate lust, in a way that Æthelthryth is not, and so the virgin martyrs are more conceptually useful as didactic tools.
In the early fifteenth century, the three de Limbourg brothers illustrated a lavish book of hours for Jean de France, Duc de Berry. This devotional manuscript includes a miniature of St. Jerome in which he is tricked into donning female attire. The saint is shown in church wearing a long, blue, figure-hugging dress, being discussed by two watching monks. It is from this image of St. Jerome that Robert Mills begins his wide-ranging discussion of sodomitical sin in the Middle Ages. Mills notes that, despite attempts to uncouple sexuality and gender in some modes of political activism, to a “twenty-first century viewer, conditioned by long-standing associations between gender-variant behaviour and sexual dissidence, it may well look as though the gossiping monks are being covertly homophobic” (p. 2). Jerome’s effeminate dress, in this reading, is a sign of his homosexuality. Through a nuanced close reading of the medieval context, Mills argues instead that the attempt to associate Jerome with the fleshly bodies of women “would have been interpreted as an attack on Jerome’s chastity” (p. 6). This kind of destabilizing analysis is typical of Mills’s impressive book, which combines theoretical insights with attentive close reading of texts, images, and material culture.