“Performing their Holy Duties”: Female Community and Same-Sex Desire in Anglo-Saxon Monasteries

Abstract

This dissertation discusses female-female relationships in an Anglo-Saxon monastic context, focussing on the opportunities and limitations for such relationships, and on how they might have been perceived and described. While evidence for same-sex relationships in the Anglo- Saxon period is virtually non-existent, it is important to uncover what can be said about marginalised experiences in spite of limitations and difficulties. This dissertation firstly explains in more detail the evidentiary and conceptual difficulties of researching medieval same-sex relationships. However, it also demonstrates that, by examining the possibilities for same-sex relationships in monastic life, and by reading the silence in the Anglo-Saxon source material, especially the hagiographical texts, a discussion of same-sex desire becomes possible. Bede’s narrative of the life of Ethelburg of Barking in the Ecclesiastical History, Aelfric’s “Life of Eugenia”, and Rudolf’s “Life of Leoba” contain descriptions of friendships between women that, although not explicitly sexual or erotic, may be indicative of same-sex desire. By altering our assumptions about what eroticism would look like in Anglo-Saxon texts, and by being aware of the inherent limitations of this type of research, it is possible to come to new readings of female-female relationships without creating anachronisms or imposing inaccurate identity categories on Anglo-Saxon women.