England in Europe: Women, Multilingualism and Patronage in the Eleventh Century

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The eleventh century has traditionally been constructed as a fallow period for English literary culture. The linguistic and political upheaval caused by the Danish (1016) and Norman (1066) conquests is thought to have imposed a period of inactivity, creating a fundamental discontinuity between Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman literary culture. My research studies histories produced for English royal women to challenge this traditional view. Especially important are those written for Queen Emma (+1052), Queen Edith (+1075) and Queen Matilda (+1118). Both Emma and Edith, finding themselves at the centre for the period's turbulent political life and court culture, sought to protect their interests by commissioning Flemish clerics to write histories of their husbands' reigns. Queen Matilda, the Anglo-Saxon wife of the Norman king Henry I, inherited the literary culture of her pre-conquest predecessors. I argue that in order to see this history-writing as integral to English literature, we need both to set aside nationalizing literary history, which would dismiss these works as foreign rather than international, and to take the agency involved in women's patronage serious. Taking such an approach, I show that far from being an interlude the 11th century was a vibrant period of creativity for English literature. The literary culture of late Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman England (with its often contradictory accounts of conquest, factionalism and near civil war) was extraordinarily lively as clerics and lay patrons, most especially women, grappled with what it meant to give a true account of events. At the heart of much of this history-writing lie innovative responses to the Roman story-world, especially as transmitted in classical Latin poetry. Moreover because this history-writing flourished in multilingual context (with Latin, English, French, Danish and Flemish all being used), the early use of English as a written language was able to encourage the emergence of written French and thus nourished European literary culture more broadly.