So, yeah – that update didn’t happen. I wrote it out, but never finished it, and it didn’t get posted. So let’s try this again.

What I’m studying this semester is Anglo-Saxon women’s place in the law. The primary period that I’ll be talking about is between about 600 and 1066 AD/CE. (The AD and CE thing is the subject for another blog post.) I wrote a three-page proposal basically laying out a bit of what historians have said on the subject and what sort of sources were available; that turned out OK, and I’ve turned in the following assignment, the literature review, as well. The literature review is basically an analytical summary of the historiography – academic speak for “what historians have said about that thing so far.” It’s 8-10 pages, not including footnotes, and I wrote it last Sunday. (And into the early morning hours Monday. It was a fun 16 hours of work, but the end product was actually pretty good.)

But instead of just talking about what I’m doing, maybe I should just actually explain it, so this is less boring for the two people who actually end up reading this. What follows is a very short summary of a much longer analysis, so please let me know below if parts of it don’t make sense, and I will do my best to clarify.

Essentially, for quite a long time historians thought that women in England during the Anglo-Saxon period had quite extensive legal rights and social standing that was brought to an end by the Norman conquest, and was unparalleled until the modern era. This view predominated from at least the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, and drew on historic ideas of rugged Germanic freedom going back to Tacitus in the second century.

These historians basically saw women leaving land in wills, witnessing charters, and exerting power as abbesses and queens – King Alfred’s daughter, Æthelflæd’s, rather awesome butchering of Vikings in particular – and said “Hey, look at these ladies! They’re pretty equal! That’s cool.” Women’s history was virtually identified with men’s history, and the stories of families with political power.

But with more examination of the evidence by increasingly professional historians and linguists, and the influence of new fields like anthropology and sociology, this consensus began to change. With the rise of Second-Wave Feminism in the 1960s, social history became a new field of serious historical inquiry. As the 1970s began, general women’s history became a more potent force within the field of medieval history and began to filter into the study of medieval women, including women in the Anglo-Saxon period. This study began first with the examination of prominent women before moving into the search for the non-political and daily lives of other women as well.

Building off of the works of anthropologists – most notably Lorraine Lancaster in the 1950s and Jack Goody in the 1980s – historians began to consider instead how the extant legal documents showed women as the tools of larger kin networks. While women often seemed like they were freely bequeathing property in wills, they were often actually simply giving force to conditions they’d inherited with the land, largely from their fathers or husbands. Statistical analyses of Domesday records began to show how little property women actually owned, and how the vast majority of it was concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite. Historians began to view Anglo-Saxon women as less near-equal “masterful ladies,” and more agents of patronage and power, trapped and restricted by networks of men who used them to transfer and negotiate property.

This kin-based analysis gradually fell out of favor as time progressed, however. Historians pointed out that even when women’s choices were highly restricted – a woman might have been forced to, say, donate a certain property to a church or bequeath it to a member of her dead husband’s family – they often still possessed a significant degree of choice in the details. And the quite vigorous protections women were afforded in Anglo-Saxon law, especially from violent crimes and most particularly rape, contradicted the view of women as second-class citizens used as conduits for male power.

And while I’m omitting a huge amount, that’s pretty much where the field is now: they had fairly substantial legal rights and protections, but were nevertheless limited by many aspects of the culture in which they lived – so, for instance, while they could own property like men, they tended not to, because of the cultural emphasis on keeping property in male hands, and while their choices of what to do with their property were often strictly curtailed, so were those of men.

I’m not sure how much sense all of that makes, but I’m going to leave it at that for now. Better to post something that’s slightly confusing than nothing at all! (And of course, I’m perfectly willing to clarify anyone’s questions in the comments.