Chapter 2 - Records on the Landscape

Summary

The landscape – both its natural landmarks and architecture – serves as a public space of women’s genealogical record in the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman lives of Audrée, Osith, and Modwenne, contained in the Campsey manuscript, with all three texts invested in women’s kinships, succession, land uses, and geographical movement. This chapter explores how landmarks caused by the protagonists’ intimate, direct interaction with the land – here called “contact landmarks” – offer material proof of women’s legacies that do not involve, and even reject, biological or sexual relations. As Audrey, Osith, and Modwenna resist marriage and motherhood, they inscribe rock faces and church doors, create springs and islands, and inhabit transient water spaces, like rivers and pools, creating claims to space and time that reflect their independent lives and legacies. These landmarking acts are compared to descriptions of outdoor births and land-oriented birth visions in high medieval chronicles and hagiography and discussed in relation to Isabella of Arundel, a landowning widow who perhaps commissioned the manuscript.