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Reviews of Books
and nearly all the required scholarly apparatus (the
glossary includes the term aeration with a meaning not
given in the Oxford English Dictionary). Each reader
will add items of personal choice in the index (in the
present case, Moengal, pp. 103, 111). A work of
stupendous learning (with 150 pages of endnotes) as
well as down-to-earth vision, this monograph is the
fruit of a long process of studying manuscript culture
in the Middle Ages; the first tentative steps in this field
were published by Saenger twenty years ago. The
bibliography (pp. 439-48) in no way does justice to the
amount of scholarly achievement that is pressed into
service here. This study has all the qualities to make it
indispensible to medieval studies of every kind.
MICHAEL RICHTER
Konstanz University
MARY DOCKRAY-MLLIER.
Motherhood and Mothering in
(The New Middle Ages.) New
York: St. Martin's. 2000. Pp. xiv, 161.
Anglo-Saxon England.
Turning a postmodern feminist eye toward Old England, Mary Dockray-Miller makel a bold attempt to
bring together the divergent worlds and techniques of
cultural studies and Anglo-Saxon history and literature. Feminist medievalists have long regarded seventh
and eighth-century England as a unique time and place
for the exercise of power and authority by women, at
least by a small number of royal and aristocratic
women in religious life. Hoping to close some of the
many gaps in our vision of that Golden Age, DockrayMiller revisits prominent canonical sources such as
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Beowulf; beyond these, she
searches monastic deeds and charters, the letters and
lives of saints, and a variety of manuscript fragments
for surviving traces of "maternal genealogies" and
"maternal performance" in Anglo-Saxon England.
In a very brief introduction (perhaps too brief to
carry the weight assigned to it), the author sets forth
her theoretical framework and rationale, based primarily on significant paradigma and definitions in the
writings of Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, and Sara
Ruddick. She follows Irigaray in attention to motherdaughter and other female bonds, Butler in the notion
of gender performance, and Ruddick in the definition
of maternal "work" as the "protection, nurturance, and
training of children" (p. 2). Acknowledging the severe
limitations of her sources, Dockray-Miller scrutinizes
the Anglo-Saxon texts for evidence of maternal intention and activity. She examines the lives and achievements of the royal abbesses of the great convents and
double monasteries of the Golden Age, before Viking
raiders and monastic "reformers" put an end to women's leadership as well as to peace. The line of
Ethelbert and Bertha, the king of Kent and his Frankish Christian queen, is discussed and displayed in a
gender-balanced family tree that reveals the familial
relationships on which leadership of the great religious
houses depended—a female network flourishing within
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
the patriarchal societies of church and court. One
chapter is devoted to the inheritance and accomplishments of Adelflad, the "Lady of the Mercians," who
was the daughter of Alfred the Great but also the
inheritor and practitioner of a tradition of female
determination to raise children in peace. DockrayMiller finds in tenth-century Wessex "four generations
of maternal figuren (who) work to protect, nurture, and
teach their children in the face of Viking attack and
more domestic masculine aggression" (p. 44), a "maternal genealogy" constructed in an era much more
violent than the Golden Age.
I found the final chapter, on "The Mothers of
Beowuf," most intriguing and persuasive, perhaps because the poem presents a range of mothers, from
Grendel's dam to Hrothgar's queen, of sufficient variety and depth to allow the reader to reflect upon the
author's thesis. Dockray-Miller opposes the "masculinist heroic ethos" (p. 115) of Hrothgar to Wealthow's
maternal performance, presented as a "successful challenge to the heroic code as she negotiates to keep her
sons safe with a value system based on relationships
rather than conquests" (p. 118). Here the argument
does seem to offer a new and useful lens through which
to read the many characters and events of Beowulf.
However, the work as a whole rests on complicated
and difficult contentions, and the evidence in earlier
chapters is sometimes stretched too thin to be convincing. It is unfortunate that the arguments are not
effectively reinforced by the book's sketchy conclusion,
an afterword on "The Polities of Motherhood." Doekray-Miller's work is original and ambitious and the
attempt well worth making, but the connections between the theoretical base and the interpretation of
texts are not always sufficiently tight or convincing to
carry this interesting case.
CLARISSA ATKINSON
Harvard University
H. E. J. COWDREY. Pope Gregory VIL- 1073-1085. New
York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University. 1998. Pp.
xvi, 743. $150.00.
This is the first scholarly biography of Gregory VII to
be written for more than sixty years. A great deal of
work has been done on the papal reform movement
since then, and a new study was urgently needed.
H. E. J. Cowdrey, who has spent the past thirty years
working on aspects of Gregory's life and times and has
edited his Epistolae Vagantes, is uniquely well qualified
to write it. Cowdrey stresses the importance of the city
of Rome in the formation of Gregory's character. He
trained there as a Benedictine monk, and as Archdeacon Hildebrand was in charge of the routine administration of the Roman see in the reign of Alexander II
(who, because he retained his former bishopric of
Lucca while pope, was frequently absent from Rome).
Hildebrand was separated by his modest birth from the
aristocratic college of cardinals who had spearheaded
the reform movement since Leo IX's pontificate, and
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2001