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Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (review)
- Parergon
- Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.)
- Volume 19, Number 2, July 2002
- pp. 184-186
- 10.1353/pgn.2002.0072
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
184 Reviews Dockray-Miller, Mary, Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (The N e w Middle Ages), Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000; cloth; pp. xiv, 161; R R P £30.00; ISBN 0333913787. In Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England, Mary Dockray-Miller professes to locate the account of motherhood which may be found in a selection ofAnglo-Saxon texts. In Anglo-Saxon culture, property was transmitted through patriarchal mechanisms and, likewise, textual narratives derived from patriarchal interests. While emphasising the elision of female roles in works such as Bede's Ecclesiastical History ofthe English People, Dockray-Miller claims that power and property might pass from mother to daughter and sister to sister, as in the case of the abbacy of ALthelthryth's house at Ely. She also maintains that this demonstrates matrilineal practice which undermined patriarchal dominance. In Chapter One, Dockray-Miller argues that the problem with studying mother-daughter relations in any period stems from the cultural understanding of the role of the 'son's mother' which reinforces patriarchal dominance and intrinsically undermines a relationship between mother and daughter. Locating her study in feminist understandings of the nurturing and teaching roles of mothering, she seeks to reclaim the 'female genealogy' inherent in various mother-child relationships embedded in such texts as Bede's History, the AngloSaxon Chronicle, and Beowulf. According to Chapter Two, the roles of royal w o m e n in the conversion and subsequent establishment of a network of monastic houses in Kent, East Anglia and Northumbria suggest 'a system of religious matrilineage that depended on biological as well as spiritual maternity.' In these areas the great double houses were founded by royal women, w h o usually held foundation abbacies and then passed them on to daughters, sisters, nieces. Dockray-Miller musters no new evidence for female control of double houses or abbatial participation in political relations (both these issues have been well examined in a large corpus of historical and textual studies). But she does draw together a wide variety of supporting texts such as charters, hagiographical materials, and the Penitential of Theodore, to support her emphasis on the mutual support, nurturing and teaching which mothers and aunts provided for sisters and daughters. It is in her arguments that the relationships and power structures of the nunneries did not reproduce dynastic patriarchal patterns that this chapter becomes unconvincing. Her principal argument for this seems to be based in a manuscript fragment containing parts of Tha Halgan and part of aritualpossibly Reviews 185 performed in the nunnery at Thanet. This ritual pertains to the reception of a nun into the community by her mother but it is not clear h o w this text does not replicate patriarchal power structures or indeed h o w it demonstrates an undermining of them. In Chapter Three, Dockray-Miller endeavours to recover from the wellknown corpus of Alfredian texts the maternal genealogy of jEthelflaed Lady of the Mercians. While the interactions between iEthelflaed and her paternal grandmother, Osburgh, and aunt, iEthelswyth, and her mother, Eanswith, are (possibly) present in contemporary sources, these do not point irrevocably to a maternal genealogy ofnurturing and teaching, let alone to non-patriarchal patterns of public power. jEthelflaed's collaboration with her male relatives, her use of standard methods of conducting internal politics such as charters and religious foundations, and her command of the Mercian army, all seem to reflect traditional patriarchal methods of mle. It is undeniable that iEthelflaed was neglected by the male historians of her reign (with the exception of the Mercian Register) but wherever one uncovers her history there seems little in it to suggest that her actions were intended to further a matrilineal subversion of patriarchal practices. iElfwynn's attempted succession to her mother's role as myrcna hlcefdige is a clear case ofmatrilineal inheritance, but then iEthelflaed was clearly wanting to exclude her brother, Edward, and had no other child to leave in control of Mercia. In the second last paragraph ofthis chapter, Dockray-Miller explains, perhaps somewhat belatedly, that she has endeavoured to reconstruct iEthelflaed's maternal genealogy in order to show her as part of a 'vibrant female community' while still accepting that her...