Audrey L. Meaney

Audrey L. Meaney Audrey Meaney's professional research career began in 1955 with her appointment as Carlisle Research Student at Girton College, Cambridge, which led to her P h D (1959) on the topic 'A Correlation of Literary and Archaeological Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Heathenism'. However, for those of us in Australia w h o have studied under her, worked, and played with her, and seen atfirsthand her single-minded attitude to research, it is tempting to believe that Audrey the child was already a dedicated seeker of clues to the mysteries of life around and beyond her. Stories abound from Audrey's early years in Australia—a time when, like so many other professional women, she was juggling the demands of career and motherhood in the absence of really adequate support services—about her capacitytostir the stew and attend to the needs of one small chtid or another, while all the time hunting an elusive reference among the pile of books and papers mounting up on the kitchen table. Audrey's reputation as a researcher lies not in products of the m o d e m 'publish or perish' approach, but in works of enduring significance based on true and thorough scholarship. The depth as well as the volume of footnote/endnote references to her publications, to illustrate this point, represents months, sometimes years, of painstaking research. As her research assistant at Macquarie University for the four or five years before she retired, I had a close view of the way no stone was left unturned in her search for the clues—literary, linguistic, historical, and, above all, social and cultural—that would illuminate her arguments. At one stage in the preparation of 'Women, Witchcraft and Magic in Anglo-Saxon England', the pages of notes threatened to outnumber the pages of text. It would be fair to say that nearly all of Audrey's research, beginning with her P h D topic, has been interdisciplinary. History and archaeology are an obvious combination, but Audrey has always triedtoarrive at an understanding of things Anglo-Saxon through whatever kind of evidence was available. This attitude has led her to look at the literature, both poetry and prose, for what the Anglo-Saxon people had to say about themselves and their times; at the linguistic evidence for the way it helps, for instance,toidentify scribal practices and movements between the various scriptoria, or to arrive at an opinion about the date of a manuscript or to shed light on various other social phenomena; and at the cultural and sociological evidence wherever she could find it Audrey has said that much of her research life has revolved around a particular interest in the history of religion and magic, and the research project that has motivated much of her later work, the proposed monograph From Heathenism to Superstition in Anglo-Saxon England, will no doubt draw together the results of this abiding interest. But it seems to m e that through all PARERGON ns 10.2, December 1992 6 5. Spinks her work run two other, related interests—a wish to understand the roles women played in Anglo-Saxon society, and a fascination with cultural contacts and conflicts, whether between sub-groups of the one culture or between different cultures. Audrey's interest in Anglo-Saxon women is indicated as early as 1975 in her passing comments about the opportunities for education, or lack of them, for girls in Alfred's time ('King Alfred and his Secretariat', p. 16), and is developed in a more substantial way in her more recent works on magic and witchcraft. As can be seen from the list of publications below, Audrey's work relating to women in Anglo-Saxon England has also attracted the attention of scholars wishing to bring feminist theoretical perspectives to bear on the study of AngloSaxon society (the inclusion in 1990 of the 1979 article 'The ides of the Cotton Gnomic Poem' in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature). Her interest in cultural contacts and conflict is the underlying theme of 'King Alfred and his Secretariat'—in this case the crisis in Alfred's time caused by the viking invasions. Then, coming...