Judith as Spiritual Warrior: Female Models of Monastic Masculinity in Ælfric’s Judith and Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion

ABSTRACT

This article identifies a passage in Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion as referencing monastic discussions of Judith based on Aldhelm’s Carmen de virginitate and Prudentius’s Psychomachia. In this passage, Byrhtferth imagines himself as Judith leading an army of virgins against the forces of lechery. The context of Byrhtferth’s identification with Judith has many resonances with Ælfric’s translation of Judith, which Ælfric explains allegorically as spiritual warfare in the epilogue to the homily. The article suggests that one audience of Ælfric’s Judith would have been monks, who may have identified with her leading the army of virginity just as Byrhtferth did. By associating monasticism with Judith, as a virago, fighting in an invisible battle against spiritual adversaries, Byrhtferth, Ælfric, and their fellow monks are able to reclaim masculinity lost by their proscription from battle during the Viking invasion of the late tenth and early eleventh-century.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All citations to Ælfric’s Judith come from Assman, “Abt Ælfrics angelsächsische Homilie,” cited by line number. For a modern English translation, see Hawk. However, translations included in this article are my own. Citations to the Postscript of the Enchiridion come from Baker and Lapidge, Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion.

2 There is extensive scholarship on cross-dressing saints, see Roy; Szarmach, “Ælfric’s Women Saints: Eugenia”; and Szarmach, “St. Euphrosyne: Holy Transvestite.” More recently Rhonda McDaniel has written a monograph on metagender in Ælfric, which includes a prefatory chapter including the patristic rationale on surpassing one’s sex in Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, The Third Gender and Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, 1–68.

3 See discussion below.

4 For an overview of the history of the period and the writings that mention the Viking raids, see Keynes, “Abbot,” with discussion of Byrhtferth’s writing at, 159.

5 Marsden, 217. Although this text is commonly referred to as the Letter to Sigeweard, Marsden calls it Libellus de veteri testamento et novo. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

6 Skeat, 122.

7 Ibid. Ælfric did not have the last word on this subject, as is clearly seen at the Battle of Ashingdon, considered the final battle in Cnut’s campaign, when the bishop of Dorchester and abbot of Ramsey (both professed monks) are killed in battle fighting the alongside Ramsey’s lay patron (Baker and Lapidge, xxiv.) Ramsey abbey’s resistance to Cnut was so significant that he attempted to suppress them, and Michael Lapidge has suggested that this caused Byrhtferth to leave Ramsey later in his career to write the life of St. Ecgwine at the politically less-volatile Evesham (Lapidge, Byrhtferth of Ramsey, xxvii).

8 According to The Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, the term wæpned either alone or in compound refers to the male gender as distinct from the female one. A simple search for the fragmentary “wæpned” (including compounds such as wæpnedcild, wæpnedhad, and wæpnedmann) in the Dictionary of Old English Corpus reveals 82 occurrences in 42 texts, showing how extensively this word was used throughout the corpus to distinguish men from women. From a lexical point of view, it is the bearing of weapons that makes men men.

9 Peter Clemoes dates this work to after the completion of Lives of Saints, but before Ælfric accepted the abbacy at Eynsham, 1002–1005 (“Chronology,” 56). However, Æthelweard’s death is now commonly accepted as 998 (Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 192 n. 139). Therefore, the dates for Judith must expand to the broader window of 998–1005.

10 As a computistical text, the Enchiridion includes calculations to the current year, which indicate it was likely started in 1010 and finished in 1012; Baker and Lapidge, xxvi–xxviii.

11 Keynes (“An Abbot,” 159) claims that Byrhtferth hints darkly at issues arising from Viking conquest in the following passage: “Đus byð eall þæt þusendfeald getæl geendod and eall þa deopan þing and þa bradnyssa and þa langsumnyssa and þæra cyninga rice and þæra gerefena unriht and reaflac and deopnyssa and wodomas and prættas” [The thousandfold number will thus be ended, with all the deep things and the breadth and the length, and the authority of kings and the oppression of reeves, and plunderings and stratagems and injustices and tricks] (Baker and Lapidge, 238–9; translation by Baker and Lapidge).

12 Roach, Æthelred: the Unready, Thorkell’s raids are discussed, 253–67; Swein’s raids are detailed, 288–94.

13 The seminal piece on Anglo-Saxon views on apocalypse, millennialism, and Vikings is Godden, “Apocalypse and Invastion.” The field has moved on since then and more recent work can be found in Roach, “Apocalypse and Atonement.” Cubitt, “Apocalyptic and Eschatological Thought”; and Cubitt, “On Living in the Time of Tribulation.”

14 See above.

15 Ian Pringle focused on the address to religious women in the epilogue and argued,

the English could never hope to vanquish their enemies, the diabolical Vikings, unless the whole society first purified itself by maintaining a system of monasteries and convents in which, on an individual level, the chaste oratores could do their essential work. (“Judith,” 97.)

Mary Clayton countered that these comments to religious women, “seem oddly incongruous with the text itself” and “reflect a desire to make safe that text to contain and defuse it.” Instead she concludes “the comment in the Letter [to Sigeweard]  … seems more adequately to reflect the emphasis of the text,” that is the admonition to noblemen to fight.” “Ælfric’s Judith,” 225.

16 Klein, “Ælfric’s Sources,” 111.

17 Klein, “Gender,” 44–5 and 50. Ciaran Arthur also points out (in speaking of the poetic Judith) that Holofernes’s “shame is increased by his positioning in relation to her. It has been noted that seizing a man by his hair is a gesture of significant degradation … ” in “Postural Representations,” 878.

18 Assman, lines 434–5.

19 Ibid., lines 429–31.

20 Clayton, 225–7; Foot, 96–104.

21 For a discussion of this term, Foot, 96–104.

22 For another discussion of the change of address here, see Hostetler. She suggests,

In the pragmatic context of processing these final twenty-one lines, female readers must engage in interpretive acts which involve reading their own communities (“sume nunnan”) and themselves as a community of individual interpreters (“eow”) through Judith’s exemplar before they are included in the “we” of Christian communal and textual identity. (162)

23 See my “Scapegoating the Secular Clergy” and my Politics of Language, chap. 2.

24 Notably Byrhtferth often, but not always, did this in Latin instead of English, for discussion, see my Politics of Language, 88–93.

25 My “Scapegoating the Secular Clergy,” 128–34; and my Politics of Language, 93–100.

26 Clayton, 222.

27 Clatyon, passim; Klein, “Gender.”

28 Clayton, 225. Hugh Magennis further suggests that the epilogue is not in keeping with main text of Judith. He claims that that epilogue “has a fragmentary feel to it” and “it reads more like notes than a considered discourse.” He concludes that only the epilogue is addressed to religious women, not the whole of Judith in agreement with Mary Clayton. “Contrasting Narrative Emphases,” 65.

29 Cubitt, “Virginity and Misogyny.”

30 See above.

31 Stafford, 12–13.

32 Ibid.

33 Foot.

34 For a history and primary source for Ely, see Fairweather, with discussion of religious women in and around Ely after the refoundation of the monastery at xiii–xiv.

35 “Virginity and Misogyny,” 9. Not all scholars see this as a period of decline for female monasticism, suggesting instead that women engaged in different sorts of communities. For this view, see Yorke; and Halpin.

36 “Virginity and Misogyny,” 10–11. See also de Jong.

37 Dictionary of Old English, s.v. “ænlic.” They are ordered here by frequency of use. Earlier ones are more common, and the last “venustas” is problematic, as this is a noun and not an adjective.

38 Dictionary of Old English: A to I online, ed. Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healey et al. (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2018), s.v. “ænlic.”

39 Notably the Prosa de virginitate also emphasises this contrast between the clothes that Judith wore as a widow and what she wore to seduce Holofernes.

40 Heide Estes connects the word “ælfscinu” to Judith’s sexuality,

The conjunction of “ælfscinu” for Sarah and Judith, and “blachleor” for unnamed Hebrew women in both poems, in each case used at a moment when the women in question are seen in positions of sexual danger, either to themselves or others, suggests a common conception of Hebrew women as associated simultaneously with sexuality and with danger.

“Feasting with Holofernes,” 345.

41 For a study of Ælfric’s preferences for univalent words, see Stephenson, “Meatim sed et rusticam.”

42 The thirty-fold, sixty-fold, and hundred-fold harvest relating to virgins was originally formulated by Augustine is common throughout medieval literature. Byrhtferth discusses it in his Enchiridion in iv.1.310–32 (222). Lapidge and Baker give the evolution of the concept from Augustine in their Commentary to Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, 361. See also, Lapidge and Herren, Aldhelm: The Prose Works, 55–7.

43 “ut habeant minus indocti clerici horum mysteriorum ueritatem quam sequi ualeant absque fuco mendacii. Hęc uero monasterialibus uiris cognita sunt perfecta ratione, qui ab ipso pubertatis tyrocinio cum lacte carnis genetricis eorum lac sugxerunt aecclesię catholicę qui student amminiculatione summe trinitatis et indiuidue unitatis non solum binas uel ternas metretas uehere Domino sanctorum regi, uerum etiam tricenarii fructum et sexagenarii gratum holocaustum afferre, necnon centenarii millenis dignitatibus sertis decoratum lacteis cordibus gestare” (BE, 232). [So that the less-educated clerics may have the truth of these mysteries and may be strong enough to follow them without the deception of lies. However, the monks know with complete understanding, because from the time of their youthful training they have sucked the milk of the catholic church at the same time as their mother’s milk, and attempt with the support of the high trinity and the undivided unity to carry to the Lord, King of the saints, not only two or three measures, but to bring even the thirty-fold and the sixty-fold fruits as a pleasing sacrifice, and still to offer the sacrifice of one hundred-fold fruits with their milk-drinking hearts adorned with a thousand garlands.]

44 Stephenson, Politics of Language, chap. 3.

45 Bernard Huppé reviews depictions of Judith in Jerome, Ambrose, Hrabanus Maurus, Aldhelm, and Prudentius in The Web of Words, 139–145.

46 Michael Lapidge explains that students in an Anglo-Saxon classroom might begin studying Latin poetry in

perhaps a graded sequence of difficulty, beginning with the anonymous Disticha Catonis and/or the Epigrammata of Prosper of Aquitaine, then the Evangelia of Juvencus, the Carmen Paschale of Caelius Sedulius, and the Historia apostolica (or De actibus apostolorum) of Arator. This sequence could be amplified so as to include other Christian Latin poets: Avitus, Dracontius, Venantius Fortunatus, Prudentius (especially the Psychomachia). “Schools,” 409.

See also, idem, “The Study of Latin Texts.” See also Porter.

47 Gretsch, chap. 9.

48 Ehwald, 457 lines 2560–70. Translation is my own, but I consulted the translation in Aldhelm: The Poetic Works, translated by Michael Lapidge and James Rosier, (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 159.

49 Notice pudendum does not fits the metrical line here, while pudor does, and Latin metrical requirements may be more important in these lines than subtle connotative differences.

50 Lapidge and Herren, Aldhelm: Prose, 52–6.

51 Craft of Thought, 146–7.

52 Notably, Judith is not the only non-virgin who is recorded in the De virignitate, as the church patriarchs are also discussed.

53 Speaking of the poetic Judith, Jane Chance speaks of the many possible kinds of allegorical battle that Judith typifies,

Judith seems to portray all three types [of allegorical battling] in the same contest—the chaste soul or anima battling the lechery of Olofernes (Holofernes), the virtuous warrior of God or miles Dei modeled on Christ opposing the viciousness of the tyrant and evil associated with the Devil, and finally a prefiguration of the church or Ecclesia triumphing over Synagogue and paganism. Woman as Hero, 36.

54 For a discussion of the “three orders” in Old English literature, see Powell.

55 Baker and Lapidge, Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, 246.

56 Emphasis added.

57 See above.

58 For a fuller discussion, see Stephenson, Politics of Language, chap. 3.

59 The final example, which is closest in meaning to what the devils are doing, comes from Vercelli 20 and seems to be a calque on the Latin word discurrit, since the Latin prefix “dis” in this sense means “through”. The case could also be made that geondscriðað is a direct translation of a Latin compound and not a word that commonly occurs in Old English.

60 As an analogy, Mechthild Gretsch argued that the OE word wuldorbeag translated the Latin word corona when it referred to the metaphorical crown worn by a martyr, but not when it referred to the literal crown worn by a king. Intellectual Foundations, 98–104.

61 Sense 3: “of the gliding motion of a ship, cloud, etc., or of the motion of a heavenly body in its orbit.” Sense 4: “of the increase or decrease of light.” Sense 5: “of the coming of times or seasons, of the passage of time.” Bosworth, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, s.v. scríðan.

62 Dictionary of Old English, s.v. “geondscriþing.”

63 Clover, 395–6.

64 Ibid., 396.

65 Ibid., 396.

66 “Regardless of Sex,” 398.

67 For the connection between Judith and wisdom, see Klein, “Gender.”

68 See above.