England in Europe: English Royal Women and Literary Patronage, c. 1000–c. 1150 by Elizabeth M. Tyler (review)

Elizabeth Tyler's transformative study of English queens' patronage of Latin literature in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries builds, in new and adventurous ways, on developments in the study of late Anglo-Saxon culture that have occurred over the last two or three decades. To a high degree, these developments have been influenced by the closer collaboration between English and continental scholars that has been facilitated by membership of the European Union.

Tyler's over-arching aim is not merely to contribute 'new, more European frameworks' (p. 11). She seeks 'to move Anglo-Saxon literary culture from the periphery to the centre of Europe and to show that its impact continued as a constitutive role in European culture well beyond 1066' (p. 19). This centrality becomes apparent only if we 'radically revise our established understandings of eleventh-century English literature by including women and changing our chronological and geographical parameters' (p. 5).

Taylor's multidimensional and multilayered study is not easy to grasp whole, much less summarize, and her brief introduction and conclusion do not do justice to the complexity of her study. Essential to the perspective shift she aims to bring about, however, is that the three English queens she chiefly discusses (Emma, Edith, and Edith/Matilda) were at the forefront of major and ongoing developments in high medieval Western European literary culture by their patronage of Latin historical writings as a vehicle for dynastic and polemical purposes.

It is worth recalling that the mainstream view of Latin literacy in eleventh-century England was (and arguably still is) that it was almost exclusively the province of a few male religious houses reformed in the tenth century by Bishop Athelwold. And it was saved from extinction in the eleventh century only by the arrival of scholars from the continent, particularly after Edward ('the Confessor') returned from Normandy in 1042 to claim the English throne. As Christopher Hohler viewed it in Tenth-Century Studies (Phillimore, 1975), 'except in as much as an insignificant minority of scholars was prepared, as well as able, to provide translations [of Latin], the [English] Church remained cut off from the general cultural heritage of the West' (p. 74). Christine Fell, in her ground-breaking study Women in Anglo-Saxon England (Blackwell, 1984), demonstrated women's participation in Latin literary culture in the early period, but affirmed that 'the equality of the sexes which flourished in the eighth century in learning and literacy was replaced in the tenth by equality of ignorance' (p. 128).

Continental clerics, then, according to this view, were seminal to the diffusion of cultural influences, particularly in England where, it is still commonly held, the first stirrings of what would become the twelfth-century Renaissance were brought by highly educated scholars like Archbishop Lanfranc in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Tyler, by contrast, aims to establish that royal women, particularly English royal women, who were widely dispersed on the continent by marriage and exile, were at the heart of networks of literary influence, and played a greater part than clerics in the development of court literature.

Tyler is at her most convincing in her close textual analysis of the Latin writings dedicated to Edith and Edith/Matilda. Her particular focus is classical allusions, specifically to the Aeneid, which she regards as a distinctive feature of avant-garde literati. She makes a strong case for both Edith and Edith/Matilda as highly educated women who were closely involved in the production of the Latin histories they commissioned.

Central to Tyler's argument in these chapters is the role of the Wilton nunnery, where both queens were educated. Tyler describes Wilton as 'on the cutting edge of new developments that would change the face of both Latin and French poetry […] and at the...