Chapter 17 - Gender and the Subjects of History in the Early Middle Ages

Summary

What connections might be found between those who write history and the different kinds of histories they write? An emphasis on gender often focuses on the dynamics of women’s collaborative authorship, whether produced anonymously or in the form of patron and client relationships. But it also highlights the fact that sole authorship is often associated with male writers; with masculinity. Beginning with the Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, an anonymous Life that may have been composed by a woman, the chapter next addresses Æthelweard’s Latin Chronicle, written by a secular, elite male author for and in collaboration with a female patron and family relation, Abbess Matilda of Essen. It concludes with another kind of history, that of the anonymous Old English poem, Widsith, and the insight that the sheer variety of early medieval historiography is also suggestive of the different uses of gender by its authors.