Gender, transformation and the body in Aldhelm's 'De Virginitate' and the Anglo-Saxon double monastery

This thesis analyzes the body and gender in the context of Anglo-Saxon monasticism by examining hagiography, legal culture and the structure of the double monastery. It demonstrates how the double monastery, an institution where male and female religious lived in the same communities often under a female abbess, was instrumental in creating a distinctive gender ideology. Contemporary sources such as Aldhelm's De Virginitate praised these monastic communities, while simultaneously attempting to create a new understanding of gender tied to images of the transcendent body that was neither male nor female, and which some historians have explained as a "third gender," focused on the chaste or virginal monastic body, which was stripped of "feminine" sexuality and dedicated to the "masculine" pursuit of spiritual purification. This innovative gender ideology was the product of numerous and often contradictory cultural mores that stemmed from the introduction of Roman Christianity into the pagan Anglo-Saxon world. However, the efficacy of this "third gender" as a category within monastic theology was undermined by Aldhelm's and his readers' reliance on classical and contemporary ideas regarding gender and the nature of sexuality itself.