On Wed, 27 May 1998 10:13:47 GMT Bill East <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Reply to Renihan - 3
> "Jesus, sweet Jesus, my dear, my darling, my lord, my saviour, my honey, my
> balm. Sweeter is your memory than honey in the mouth. Who may not love
> your lovely face? What hard is so hard that it may not melt in the memory
> of you? Ah who may not love you, lovely Jesus?"
>
> As I say, you may have found that a bit over the top, and there are reasons
> for thinking it was written by a rather overheated nun. It just goes to
> show that there were a lot of opinions, a lot of tastes, in the middle ages,
> and we mustn't suppose that everybody was dragooned into thinking or feeling
> the same things.
>
>
There is no real reason for assuming that 'Wohunge' was written by 'a
rather overheated nun': i) the context it assumes is anchoritic
rather than monastic (the speaker says 'May my body hang with your
body nailed on the cross, fixed fast within four walls; and I wish to
hang with you and never leave my cross again till I die', lines
591-5, and the work is linked by style, dialect, and MS association
with _Ancrene Wisse_, which is a rule for lay-anchoresses) ii)
although the speaker is female, the work concludes, 'Pray for me, my
dear sister; I have written this for you because words often
encourage the heart to meditate on our Lord' (lines 645-9), which
suggests that the author may have been a spiritual director, and
certainly indicates that s/he was not identical with the speaker.
So where did the theory of female authorship start? With Einenkel
in 1882; he postulated a female author for _Wohunge_ because of what
he saw as its 'feminine' style, its predominance of imagination and
feeling over logical thought (do I detect a trace of this attitude in
Bill's 'overheated'?). I don't want to be equally sexist by falling
into the fallacy (which has been cogently challenged by Alexandra
Barratt) that all anonymous medieval works were written by men; but
the best feminist history is written against the grain, and I think
we would need more evidence than we have to claim that _Wohunge_ is
of female authorship,
Bella M.
----------------------
Bella Millett
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