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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English Literature

The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English Literature

Horner, Shari

Paperback

Series: Suny Medieval Studies

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0791450104
ISBN13: 9780791450109
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: May 24 2001
Pages: 217
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.48 Width: 5.94 Depth: 9.02
Language: English

Examines representations of women and femininity in Old English poetry and prose.

2001 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Exploring Old English texts ranging from Beowulf to lfric's Lives of Saints, this book examines ways that women's monastic, material, and devotional practices in Anglo-Saxon England shaped literary representations of women and femininity. Horner argues that these representations derive from a discourse of female monastic enclosure, based on the increasingly strict rules of cloistered confinement that regulated the female religious body in the early Middle Ages. She shows that the female subjects of much Old English literature are enclosed by many layers-literal and figurative, textual, material, discursive, spatial-all of which image and reinforce the powerful institutions imposed by the Church on the female body. Though it has long been recognized that medieval religious women were enclosed, and that virginity was highly valued, this book is the first to consider the interrelationships of these two positions-that is, how the material practices of female monasticism inform the textual operations of Old English literature.

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