Ruling women: Popular representations of queenship in late Anglo-Saxon England

My dissertation examines how Anglo-Saxon literary and historical narratives worked to construct public attitudes toward queenship during the late ninth through early eleventh centuries. This period witnessed dramatic changes in the social and symbolic power of royal wives, including the establishment of new titles for queens and queen-mothers, the increasing use of public anointing ceremonies for queens, the formal appointment of a queen as the official patron of female monasteries, the regular attendance of queens at meetings of the royal council, and queens' participation as patrons and staunch supporters of the Benedictine reforms. Focusing on vernacular writings composed in Wessex--which was the home of the royal family and the intellectual hub of the Benedictine reforms--I examine how textual depictions of royal wives worked to create popular ideals of queenship and how these ideals were in turn used to propagate reformist ideologies of gender and family among the Anglo-Saxon laity.;Chapter one examines representations of queenship in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser's Life of Alfred. Both texts demonstrate that ninth-century Wessex queens were valued mainly for their ability to create dynastic connections through marriage. Asser's Life concomitantly shows that public attitudes toward queenship in ninth-century Wessex were far more complex than mere wholesale acceptance of the actual roles available to queens within that culture. Chapter two focuses on Cynewulf's Elene, reading the poem in the context of new titling practices for late Anglo-Saxon queens and changing attitudes toward royal concubinage. My third and fourth chapters investigate AElfric's discussions of the Old Testament queens Jezebel and Esther in his Old English biblical translations. I argue that AElfric uses Jezebel to offer a veiled critique of late tenth-century royal counsel, while Esther functions as a means for him to address the problem of royal divorce and to examine the relationship between physical beauty and inner virtue. Throughout my dissertation, I argue that changing ideals of queenship were met with a profound ambivalence on the part of early medieval writers, who sought both to laud the accomplishments of queens as well as to prescribe limits over their spheres of influence.