Beauty
and the Banquet: Queenship and Social Reform in Ælfric's Esther
Stacy S. Klein, Rutgers
University
Seo cwen hæfde
getacnunge pære halgan geladunge ealles cristenes folces. . . .
Be pissere geladunge cwæd se witega to gode; Adstitit regina a dextris
tuis. in uestitu deaurato. circumdata uarietate; Pæt is. Seo cwen
stent æt dinre swydran. on ofergyldum gyrlan. ymbscryd mid menigfealdre
fahnysse.
(The queen was a type of the holy church of all christian folk. . . .
Of this church the prophet said to God, "Adstitit regina a dextris tuis,
in vestitu deaurato, circumdata varietate "; that is, "The queen stands
at thy right, in gilded raiment, clothed in manifold variety. ")
This quotation from Ælfric's homily On the Dedication of a Church
lucidly illustrates one of the most culturally enduring metaphors of queenship:
the queen as Holy Church united to Christ in marriage. Yet, even as Ælfric
attempts to stabilize the symbolic significance of the queen, he continually
highlights her imaginative potential: draped in the elaborate garments befitting
Christ's spouse and glossed in both Latin and the vernacular, she is literally,
figurally, and even lexically "ymbscryd mid menigfealdre fahnysse" ("clothed
in manifold variety"). Given the metaphorical richness of queens, one might
expect that they would have been particularly attractive figures to Anglo-Saxon
writers. Nevertheless, even the closest examination of the extant Anglo-Saxon
corpus yields few contemporaneous discussions of living queens, a textual
gap that may be attributed partly to writers' fears of potentially offending
royal women, but also to the fact that the Anglo-Saxons had a fundamentally
different way of engaging with their own culture than by addressing it directly.
As many scholars have observed, the Anglo-Saxons were somewhat retrospectively
inclined, preferring to think about virtually every aspect of their society
not by direct critique or description but through models offered by textual
accounts of the past: late antique Christian writings, pagan Germanic legends,
and, particularly, Old Testament narratives. As Malcolm Godden argues: "For
the Anglo-Saxons the Old Testament was a veiled way of talking about their
own situation . . . a means of considering and articulating the ways in
which kingship, politics and warfare related to the rule of God."
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