SNN115856 - Women and Writing in Eastern England

Despite the expanding research on women’s writing in early medieval England in recent years, much work has focussed on literary history, studying primarily written documents. Overall, historians agree that female participation began in the seventh century, with the flourishing of female monastic culture and a role for women as literate abbesses and nuns. However, most studies have considered only the surviving written evidence, and overlooked the uses of writing visible in the archaeological record. Their sources, therefore, present an incomplete view of reality. This dissertation brings together the material cultural evidence for women’s writing: inscriptions of female associated objects. Analysis of these sources reveals that women were using writing in a variety of ways, on different object types and in different scripts and languages, for numerous purposes. This was a sporadic tradition spanning the fifth – eighth centuries. Therefore, women participated in written culture long before the seventh century, and outside of literary and Christian contexts. The final section of this dissertation challenges existing understandings of literacy in an early medieval context. Previously defined by an ability to read and write (in Latin), literacy is better understood as linked to the ways in which writing was used, even by those who could not read. The evidence shows women participating in diverse literacy practices, indicating they were literate in significant, though unfamiliar, ways. This study is part of a continually developing field of women’s and gender studies in early medieval Europe. By integrating the written and material cultural evidence and compiling a base corpus of inscribed objects associated with women, this work will contribute to future research on similar topics.