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Unruly Women and Christianity in Medieval Europe Sarah E East Tennessee State University Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University Electronic Theses and Dissertations Student Works 8-2017 Get Thee ot a Nunnery: Unruly Women and Christianity in Medieval Europe Sarah E. Wolfe East Tennessee State University Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.etsu.edu/etd Part of the Celtic Studies Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Medieval Studies Commons, Scandinavian Studies Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Wolfe, Sarah E., "Get Thee to a Nunnery: Unruly Women and Christianity in Medieval Europe" (2017). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 3263. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3263 This Thesis - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Works at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Get Thee to a Nunnery: Unruly Women and Christianity in Medieval Europe __________________________ A thesis presented to The faculty of the Department of English East Tennessee State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in English __________________________ by Sarah Elizabeth Wolfe August 2017 ________________________ Dr. Thomas H. Crofts, Chair Dr. Joshua Reid Dr. Brian Maxson Keywords: medieval women, Europe, England, Scandinavia, Norse sagas ABSTRACT Get Thee to a Nunnery: Unruly Women and Christianity in Medieval Europe by Sarah Elizabeth Wolfe This thesis will argue that the Beowulf Manuscript, which includes the poem Judith, Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, and the Old-Norse-Icelandic Laxdœla saga highlight and examine the tension between the female pagan characters and their Christian authors. These texts also demonstrate that women’s power waned in the shift between pre-Christian and Christian Europe. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................2 Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................4 Role of Women in Beowulf .................................................................................................6 The Beowulf Manuscript ....................................................................................................15 Introduction ........................................................................................................................15 Wealtheow .........................................................................................................................16 Modthryth ..........................................................................................................................18 Judith ..................................................................................................................................21 Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................24 2. ALFHILD ..................................................................................................................................26 3. UNN THE “DEEP-MINDED” AND GUDRUN ÓSVÍFSDÓTTIR .........................................30 4. ÆLFTHRYTH ...........................................................................................................................41 5. CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................................................52 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................55 VITA ..............................................................................................................................................59 3 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This thesis will argue that the Beowulf manuscript, which includes the poem Judith, Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, and the Old-Norse-Icelandic Laxdœla saga highlight and examine the tension between the female pagan characters and their Christian authors. These texts demonstrate that women’s power waned in the shift between pre-Christian and Christian Europe. I chose this particular time-period because the early medieval age to the middle of the tenth century was an important era to analyze and study. The female characters discussed in this thesis as well as one actual queen, are unusual because there are not many studies written about them. The first chapter will explore the Beowulf manuscript, and I will use it as a backdrop for the other texts in this thesis. The women in Beowulf are though-provoking and vibrant characters as they each embody a specific form of Queenship in the Anglo-Saxon period. I will use Leslie W. Rabine’s essay “Love and the New Patriarchy: Tristan and Isolde” to demonstrate that the women in Beowulf are static as an overall structural form. Their power as women is completely different during this period than what Leslie Rabine examines in her essay with the figure of Isolde. The second chapter will analyze the poem Judith, which is in the same manuscript as Beowulf. Judith demonstrates that Anglo-Saxon queens used the figure of the eponymous heroine as an example for a strong and active ruler. Even though Christian elements in Beowulf are tailored and uneven, Judith directly relies on God to aid her and save her people from the onslaught by the Assyrians. After she beheads Holofernes, Judith is given both earthly and heavenly glory for her reliance on God. 4 The third chapter examines Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum and the figure of the unruly Princess Alfhild. Alfhild changes from a meek and chaste young woman into a fierce pirate until she is married to her pursuer Prince Alf. After her marriage, Alfhild bears a daughter and is erased from the storyline as an unusual figure of a pirate and shield-maiden. Although she is erased in the text after she is married and bears a daughter, Alfhild is considered a remarkable female character by critics and readers. By the thirteenth century, Christianity had become entrenched in England and Scandinavia, and I will again use Leslie W. Rabine’s essay “Love and the New Patriarchy: Tristan and Isolde”, to discuss how matriarchy and women’s power was slowly dissolved by Christianity and patriarchal power sharpened in the courtly Tristan and Isolde. The use of her essay is used analogously to Beowulf and the Old-Norse-Icelandic Laxdœla saga to examine the power women in pre-and post Christian countries. This fourth chapter discusses the two powerful female characters in the Laxdæla saga: Unn the “deep-minded” and Gudrun Ósvífsdóttir. Both women are active and influential in the saga. Unn is a daring and wise widow, who, after the death of her husband and son in Scotland, makes her way to Iceland. She is a dominant landowner and uses her influence by securing good marriage partners for her relatives and grants her grandson the ownership of her property. After a long and vibrant life, she dies of old age and is buried as a pagan woman, which is in contrast at the end of the saga, when Gudrun was buried as a Christian woman. Gudrun can arguably be considered the main character of Laxdœla saga and was regarded as not just beautiful, but wise and generous as well. Her four marriages are her power, but when she is frequently a widow, her ascendency is at its height. After the death of her fourth husband, Gudrun becomes famous for being a nun and then an anchoress. 5 Lastly, in the fifth chapter, I will examine an actual queen in comparison to the fictional royal women in this thesis such as thy mythical Alfhild or Beowulf’s Wealtheow. Her contemporaries viewed Queen Ælfthryth as both a devout Christian and a wicked woman since it was rumored that she ordered her step-son, King Edward “the Martyr ”, to be killed so her own son, King Æthelred, could rule. Even though her reputation was tainted by this possibility of murder, Ælfthryth was a founder of nunneries and a strong ally of the tenth century Benedictine reforms. I chose this particular queen instead of other such notable women like Abbess Hild or Æthelflaed, daughter of King Alfred, because Ælfthryth was an interesting mixture of unruliness and piety. Overall, each of these women, both fictional and real, pagan and Christian, are significant to this thesis and are used to highlight the tension between the (mostly) Christian authors of these various texts and their (mostly) pagan female characters. Role of Women in Beowulf Stacy S. Klein argues in her book Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature, “All of the named female figures in Beowulf are queens. Royal women in the poem thus stand as representative of “woman,” and as figures around whom accrue anxieties, questions, and issues regarding sexual difference” (91). Although there is a small number of female characters in Beowulf, which includes Beowulf’s unnamed mother and Grendel’s Mother, I will briefly examine not just Wealtheow and Modthryth, but Freawaru, Wealtheow’s daughter, Hildburgh, and Hygd, Beowulf’s Aunt. In Anglo-Saxon culture, women were lauded by being “peace-weavers”. Peace-weaving can be seen as an active function during the Anglo-Saxon period spread by women through their 6 families to keep the peace
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