Preaching at Winchester in the Early Twelfth Century

Thomas N. Hall, University of Illinois at Chicago

Students of early medieval England have long had an interest in the question of women's literacy since the records of English women who acted as authors and readers and scribes and teachers are surprisingly plentiful for the seventh through the ninth centuries. Aldhelm, Boniface, Bede, and Alcuin all included women among their correspondents, and three of these men dedicated at least one of their scholarly works to women. Several early English prayer books survive that were doubtless owned by women, and archeological investigations of the monastic sites at Whitby and Barking abbeys have turned up styluses that attest to the scribal activities of women at these foundations. Yet the preponderance of these records concerning the accomplishments of literate Anglo-Saxon women fall, as I say, in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, with few parallels from the tenth or eleventh centuries, and it is consequently difficult to construct an account of women's educational experiences that spans the entire Anglo-Saxon period and that connects in any meaningful way with the larger patterns of literary production and schooling that we know took place during these later centuries. The problem has proven especially acute for those interested in the spiritual and intellectual lives of the women who inhabited late Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman nunneries. A growing number of studies in recent years have contributed insight into the organization and patronage of nunneries, into the apparent decline in their intellectual standards following the Norman Conquest, and into the roles of priests, canons, chaplains, or even lay brothers in carrying out pastoral duties and performing manual labor in female religious houses. These studies have emphasized the close ties between Anglo-Saxon nunneries and the West Saxon royal family, and they have drawn attention to the surprising range of opportunities open to women who wished to pursue a religious vocation—whether as nuns, vowesses, hermitesses, anchoresses, or recluses—under several different forms of regulation if under any regulation at all. If a single dominant theme has emerged from this growing body of scholarship, it has been a general lament over the paucity of contemporary records pertaining to the lives of religious women. Time and again we read of nunneries that in effect have no history because so few documents survive attesting to any aspect of their existence. As Barbara Yorke has written with reference to the nunneries founded in Wessex during the late Anglo-Saxon period, "[t]he written records for all these nunneries are disappointingly slight. Charters exist for all except Amesbury, but are few in number and throw only a spasmodic light on the history of the foundations. " In the vast majority of cases, the sources are simply too fragmentary and inadequate to yield more than a glimpse into the internal histories of individual houses, and there are very few records of the materials that were available to these women for devotion, study, or liturgical celebration.