Anglo-Saxon women and the Church: sharing a common fate (review)

168 Reviews procedures will be governed by the circumstances of the individual case. A verse miscellany may require one kind of treatment, while an author such as Ben Jonson, who tried to supervise even the typography of his published work, may require another. The case studies in this volume make clear that there is no 'system', no 'theorizing', that will be adequate to all cases. As A. E. Housman remarked in his recommendations on 'The application of thought to textual criticism' (Classical Association, Proceedings, XVIII [1921-22] ), 'knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head'. Everything else is at the editor's discretion. G. A. Wilkes Department of English University of Sydney Hollis, Stephanie, Anglo-Saxon women and the Church: sharing a common fate, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 1992; cloth; pp. 323; R.R.P. £39.50/US$79.00. In this book, Stephanie Hollis argues that the position of English women in the church was already in decline before the Conquest. She traces the gradual erosion of their influence at least as far back as the eighth century. These early developments paved the way for the subsequent limitation of the queen's power during the post-Conquest period. Her theory successfully challenges the traditional view that the Norman Conquest marks a watershed in the history of women. Hollis focuses on the relationship between bishops and noblewomen during the early medieval period, illustrating her argument by close analysis of a series of clerical texts. These include an interesting discussion of Bede's significant under-representation of women's contribution to the growth of the early church. She argues that this silence derives from a general desire to accord with orthodox conceptions of the role of women. Elsewhere she considers Gregory I's letter to Augustine as evidence for postConversion attitudes, provides a reconsideration of the role and function of the double monasteries, and discusses the conflict between the undoubted economic advantages of allowing noblewomen to leave their husbands to found monasteries and the official commitment to the sanctity of marriage. Reviews 169 Hollis describes her book as a 'collection of essays' (p. 7), thus betraying a basic problem with the structure of the work. One looks in vain for a concluding chapter, although there is a sort of conclusion on pp. 1011 , sadly before w e are supplied with the evidence to support her claims. One struggles to assimilate the material presented in each section and is obliged to supply oneself the necessary links between the chapters because of the absence of adequate introduction or summarizing conclusion. The brief summary of each chapter given in the introduction is not a sufficient guide to the structure of the whole. Although the title of this book invites comparison with Christine Fell's Women in Anglo-Saxon England, the two works share little in outlook, style, or intended audience. Fell's work, broad in scope, has a tightness of touch that acts as a lively counterpoint to the seriousness and quality of its scholarship. Its style is laudably clear, and the author explains terms or concepts unfamiliar to the general reader. Hollis's book, on the other hand, makes no such concessions to its audience. The work assumes a degree of knowledge that precludes a general, or even undergraduate, readership. The difficulty is compounded by the author's prose style, which varies from the intractable to the incomprehensible. For example, 'It was an essential aspect of the social actualization of the ecclesiastical conception of marital union that gender distinction should be foregrounded. The usefulness of the idea of mystic marital union as metaphor is that it provides for the unitary fusion of otherwise irreconcilable antinomies' (p. 41). This isfranklydreadful writing. If Hollis initially intended to present her material as a series of specialist articles, rather than as a book aimed at a wider audience, this may account for the lack of background information and recapitulation necessary in a book of this length and complexity. The only compromise she makes to a more general readership is to quote...