MONASTIC LIFE Link 5

Women and Monasteries in Early England

Gillian R. Overing and Clare A. Lees have published an important essay on women in Anglo-Saxon England called "Birthing Bishops and Fathering Poets: Bede, Hild, and the Relations of Cultural Production," in the journal Exemplaria 6 (1994). (please return the journal to the shelf when you have finished with it. A copy of the article should be on reserve soon).

They focus on the episode of Cædmon's Hymn in Bede. Cædmon was a simple man who lived near the monastery at Whitby and is said to have been given the gift of song. The fourth book of Bede's Ecclesiastical History describes how Cædmon, who had "lived in the secular habit until he was well advanced in years and had never learned any songs," used to withdraw from feasts when the harp was passed and each guest was expected to sing for the group. The context of this story in Bede's History is about origins: Bede's description has been accepted as an origin on both the literary-institutional and the linguistic level, and many have accepted this episode as the origins of Christian vernacular poetry in Anglo-Saxon. Overing and Lees point out that most readings of this story overlook or minimize the role of the Abbess Hild in Caedmon's work. They use this episode to open up the larger question of the significance of women as sponsors of male ecclesiastics, and questions of "cultural production" (questions, that is, about how certain institutions cause works of art to be created, shape the careers of those who create them, and maintain social order by taking charge of important resources).

Trapp's anothology and other standard sources inform us that Cædmon was the founder of a school of Christian poetry. Others call the "Hymn" "the only authentic extant work of the first English Christian poet" and assert that the episode "lies at the heart of the fusion between native Anglo-Saxon and Latin-Christian traditions in the Old English period," and that it is "a case study of the difficulties involved in establishing definitive interpretations of Old English poems." (For further discussion, see Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins, Chapter 5.) How do the questions of gender and women's role in cultural production raised by Lees and Overing alter or influence our understanding of the significance of this episode?

Here are some questions about this episode to get you thinking and reading:

• What definition of "literacy" applies to this invention of a written tradition, and a specifically Christian context, for poetry?
• Does this text describe a system of cultural production already in existence, or does it represent the discovery of such a system? If you want to work with the problems of cultural production, be sure to read the LABOR module and check the term "means of production" in the LABOR Lexicon.

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