Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England

Obviously a part of the social fabric of Anglo-Saxon England, women are nevertheless accorded an obscure and slender role in the textual archive of masculine clerical culture. What can this record of patriarchy contribute to the history of women, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing ask. Double Agents explores the meaning and implications of women's absence and presence in the partial history of Anglo-Saxon culture.

Rather than recovering the details of exceptional women's lives, Double Agents concerns itself with the formation of the cultural record itself, and with women's relation to its processes of production and reception. By revisiting many familiar issues within the scholarly tradition--orality and literacy, documentation and authenticity, sources and analogues--and by looking at some of the core authors of the period--Bede, Aldhelm, and Aelfric, who continue the intellectual traditions of the early Church fathers--Lees and Overing address woman's entry into the patristic symbolic, the order which authorizes the record itself.