Motherhood is becoming respectable, finally, in feminist circles. For years it was something to be ignored, embarrassed about, or evaded as feminists defined themselves as daughters rather than as mothers. This focus shifted slightly in 1976 with the publication of Adrienne Rich's landmark study Of Woman Born, which differentiates between "Motherhood as Experience and Institution" (her subtitle), meaning between the patriarchal institution of motherhood, and women's actual experience of motherhood, which Rich reads to be empowering and illuminating. Motherhood as a subject of analysis has since gained legitimacy in U.S. academic feminism as the last of the baby boomers have their children and "parenting" and "families" are the buzzwords on every politician's lips.

In medieval studies, feminist theory and postmodernism have made uneasy headway into the dominant methodologies of source study and historical criticism, although physical motherhood is most often missing as a category of female experience available for scholarly inquiry. Whether one agrees with Allen J. Frantzen that "it is impossible to dismiss the revaluation of medieval evidence that feminist scholarship and gender theory have already produced" or with Judith Bennett that "the medieval studies community is often indifferent and sometimes hostile to this feminist scholarship," it is safe to say that critical examination of motherhood in medieval texts has been circumscribed by patriarchal, religious conceptions of motherhood when it has appeared at all. In The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages, Clarissa Atkinson notes that "monastic authors presented 'real' or significant motherhood as a spiritual rather than biological relationship" and remarks that the very monks who exhibited the most Marian devotion also despised actual, physical mothers. Atkinson argues that it was not until the late Middle Ages and the early modern period that there was some positively valued relationship between physical motherhood and concepts of holiness. Such spiritual motherhood is also the focus of Caroline Walker Bynum's Jesus as Mother, which discusses motherhood as a trope of religious understanding, not as actual practice. There is more textual evidence available about spiritual motherhood than about actual motherhood, an imbalance that likely accounts for the usual critical focus on spiritual motherhood.

In Anglo-Saxon studies specifically, "motherhood" has not been pursued as a working topic of analysis, although woman-centered feminist criticism has certainly made an impact in the field. Christine Fell's 1984 Women in Anglo-Saxon England provided a much-needed women's history of the period; in it, Fell argues that the overall status of women declined throughout the period. Jane Chance's Woman as Hero in Old English Literature provided a specifically literary analysis of the various sorts of power wielded by women in Anglo-Saxon texts, while in 1990 Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen collected a number of important critical essays about women in Anglo-Saxon culture in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature. More theoretical gender-based readings by Gillian Overing, Clare Lees, James Hala, Karma Lochrie, and others have brought semiotics, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and deconstruction to feminist Anglo-Saxon studies.

An introduction of motherhood into this critical conversation can only expand the scope of our knowledge about and analysis of the functions, places, and desires of women in Anglo-Saxon culture. Lees and Overing have examined the spiritual motherhood of Abbess Hild of Whitby, and the ways in which Bede manipulates that "maternity" in his History, but actual motherhood in Anglo-Saxon England has received surprisingly little critical attention. Even recent work on Anglo-Saxon medical texts and obstetrical practice is focused on pregnancy, labor, and delivery, rather than on the work of mothering that continues long after an individual child is born.

I argue here that three postmodern theorists, Judith Butler, Sara Ruddick, and Luce Irigaray, can provide a rubric for an examination of the maternal as a category in Anglo-Saxon texts. Butler's concept of gender performance allows a realization of the maternal as a category separate from those of masculine and feminine. Ruddick's definition of maternal work as protection, nurturance, and training of children provides specific criteria in the search for maternal performers in Anglo-Saxon texts. Finally, Irigaray's descriptions of maternal genealogy can point to successful maternal performers in Anglo-Saxon texts who leave subjectivity, agency, and power to their daughters.

Protection, nurturance, and training of children constitutes maternal work in Anglo-Saxon England, maternal work that is stymied at every turn by patriarchal Anglo-Saxon culture. In literary and historical sources, maternal performers find ways to co-opt the patriarchy that both needs and effaces maternal reproduction. Analysis of actual, rather than spiritual, mothers in Anglo-Saxon history and literature reveals strong maternal strategies used throughout the culture to protect, nurture, and teach children -- sons as well as daughters. The performances of the variously related queens, saints, and abbesses of the eighth-century Kentish royal family; of Æðelflæd, Lady of the Mercians; and of the various mothers in Beowulf all point to a system of maternal practice preserved almost inadvertently in the textual sources of Anglo-Saxon England, a system that maternal performers manipulated to enable them to raise their children.

Butler's Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter clarify the notion of gendered performances that are repeated to the point where they seem natural or inevitable (although they are neither). Butler says that performance, not biology, determines gender: "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results." In Bodies That Matter, Butler expands upon this notion of performativity, which, she emphasizes, is not a subjective, conscious "choice" by an already essentialist, humanist "self." In Bodies, Butler corrects misperceptions by readers of Trouble, stating that by "performativity" she did not mean that "...one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night." Rather than the subject deciding its gender, "gender is part of what decides the subject." One cannot precede the other in some sort of linear progression. Genders are not constructed onto preexisting sexed bodies; gender construction is not an act that can be deemed "finished" at a certain point. The performativity of gender depends on an understanding of gender construction as an ongoing process (or performance) that is never ultimately complete.

That ongoing process depends on repetition and reinscription of "norms" of gender. Butler's arguments about the materiality of the body insist upon "the understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains." As such, what humanity has traditionally perceived as "the sexes" are, for Butler, actually "normative positions." Such a position takes its place in a "citation" of previous performances, so that performances layer one upon another to posit an illusion of determined sex. For Butler, "Performativity is not a singular 'act,' for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition."

Butler's main goal, if that term is not too teleological for such a philosopher, is examination of examples of "disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized"; for her, it is those sites of disidentification that serve to undermine what she calls "the heterosexual imperative," "the regime of heterosexuality," or "compulsory heterosexuality" that reigns in contemporary Western culture. As such, norms of gender construction may seem inflexible when they are defined as "the repeated stylization of the body"; yet disidentification, or slippage from those norms, is what reveals their very unnatural constructedness and provides ways to challenge those norms. Such an "enabling disruption" overlooks or resists citations of the norm, and refuses to cite such a norm, insisting on a performance without precedent.

While Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking does not state it explicitly, Ruddick ascribes to a theory of gender performance much like Butler's, especially in her argument that "maternal work" can (and should) be performed by men as well as by women. That work is "to take upon oneself the responsibility of child care, making its work a regular and substantial part of one's working life." Ruddick rejects such organic notions as instinctive mother-love or mother-knowledge that (some people assume) appear "naturally" upon the birth of the child; indeed, she consciously separates birthgiving from mothering as two separate kinds of work. Ruddick's schema of maternal work is threefold: she argues for "the goals of preservation, growth, and social acceptability as constitutive of maternal practice." Or, as she states elsewhere, "mothers are people who see children as 'demanding' protection, nurturance, and training."

Protection or preservation of a child may seem too basic to be called part of a thoughtful practice, but Ruddick points out that "In any culture, maternal commitment is far more voluntary than people like to believe." While a late-twentieth-century mother may worry about traffic and kidnappers, in contrast to a medieval mother who may have worried about disease and Viking raids, mothers must actively take steps to protect their children from injury or death. The most immediate action is to feed the child; until relatively recently, the only food source for an infant was the body of a lactating woman. Ruddick argues that such action is "the central constitutive, invariant aim of maternal practice."

Nurturance, the second criterion, involves shielding and guiding the child's emotional and intellectual growth. While such practice would have had different ends and different means a thousand years ago (most mothers would probably not have taught their children to read, stories about King Alfred's childhood aside), the criterion is still relevant -- a mother must equip her child to live as fully as possible in the society into which he or she has been born.

Training, for Ruddick, means "to shape... children's growth in 'acceptable' ways" so that the child is an accepted, ideally a welcomed, member of the social group to which the mother and child belong. Acceptance in a rural eighth-century village or a thriving tenth-century town or the late-twentieth-century United States all imply vastly different standards, but the maternal performer must raise her child to meet those standards. While Ruddick uses the term "train," I will be using "teach" to indicate the third term that distinguishes maternal performance. Ruddick acknowledges that "train" is "somewhat harsh," although she prefers it because of its neutrality. I prefer "teach" since it more fully conveys the intellectual feat of raising a child; it connotes a reciprocity in the relationship; and it implies the wide-ranging nature of maternal practice. Ruddick sees a relationship among these three forms of practice; in keeping her child alive (protection), a mother then provides the opportunity to nurture and teach him or her in the customs of their culture.

Ruddick acknowledges that her philosophy is grounded in late-twentieth-century, white, middle-class America. Yet her ideals, she argues, permeate social and cultural boundaries in that her "primary concern is with moral claims about the responses children deserve." As I have indicated above, these criteria also permeate historical boundaries; children in any age, in any culture, need protection, nurturance, and teaching to grow into socially acceptable adults, although the specifics of that practice were necessarily vastly different in the Middle Ages from what they are today. In the individual chapters that follow, I hope to show that Anglo-Saxon mothers engaged in practices like those Ruddick describes.

When these maternal performers were successful, when they protected, nurtured, and taught their children, they could create what Irigaray terms a maternal genealogy. In Sexes and Genealogies, Irigaray uses and then breaks down the terms and models of psychoanalysis that describe the Mother. She forces an acknowledgement that the sexuality and gender of the Mother is subversive and enigmatic, and reveals that the traditional psychoanalytic focus on the child elides that subversiveness in order to render it inoperative.

Throughout Sexes and Genealogies, Irigaray advocates woman's reclamation of maternal, female genealogy and a rejection of a cultural genealogy that separates the mother and daughter to make the daughter into only a mother in her husband's house. She invokes a number of mythic archetypes to show how the mother-daughter bond is routinely severed in Western culture; for her, the primary myth in our culture is not Oedipus's patricide but Orestes's murder of Clytemnestra, the "original matricide" that was condoned by the gods as revenge for the murder of the father, Agamemnon.

Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon for a number of reasons, all of which identify her as a woman noncompliant with patriarchy: she has taken a lover who is ruling the kingdom with her; Agamemnon has returned with his latest mistress, Cassandra; Agmemnon had killed their daughter, Iphigenia, to get the right wind to sail to Troy (a mission devoted to reclaiming his brother's sexual rights over Helen). For Irigaray, the murder of Iphigenia, the "motive often forgotten by the authors of tragedy," is the most salient of these motives; Agamemnon, like patriarchal structure, needs violence to sever the bond between mother and daughter.

This reclamation of a female genealogy, Irigaray hopes, will lead to a society in which gender difference is accepted rather than subsumed in a hopeless attempt at neutrality that is actually a veiled masculinity. The following quotation shows the immediacy of myth in Irigaray's schema of female genealogy that can lead to acknowledged sexual difference:

But very few students of myth have laid bare the origins, the qualities and functions, the events that led up to the disappearance of the great mother-daughter couples of mythology: Demeter-Kore, Clytemnestra-Iphigenia, Jocasta-Antigone, to mention only a few famous Greek figures that have managed to leave some traces in patriarchal times.

I suggest that those of you who care about social justice should put up posters in public places showing beautiful images of that natural and spiritual couple, the mother-daughter, the couple that testifies to a very special relationship to nature and culture.

This mother-daughter bond can become a paradigm for women's relationships with each other as well; rather than a feared phallic mother from whom the daughter needs to separate, the mother should instead be viewed as a source of strength.

Irigaray argues that in western culture, the cult of maternity is actually "the cult of the son's mother" (emphasis hers), a celebration of maternity that serves to reinscribe male domination of women and male use of female reproductive capacity. Most feminist dis-ease with maternity stems from such a construct; some feminists view maternity as a bodily submission to patriarchy rather than an opportunity for a particularly female and feminist type of practice.

Butler, Ruddick, and Irigaray, then, provide a vocabulary and criterion set for investigation of maternal performance through history. While such rubrics are helpful -- indeed, they have guided my research -- they also by their nature caution us against any universalization of an idealized maternal category. The vocabulary of maternal genealogy reveals new textual possibilities; it does not call for mothers to be reinterpreted as "better" than other women and all men nor for all mothers to be somehow the same throughout history and culture. I advocate here not simply a valorization of newly defined maternal practice, but an acknowledgement that such practice can exist, a practice with aims quite different from those usually ascribed to historical and literary figures.

In the chapters that follow, I analyze both mothers of sons and mothers of daughters, arguing finally that some mothers of daughters in Anglo-Saxon texts do manage to create maternal genealogies that do not merely reinscribe patriarchal desires about motherhood and property. Such desires engage in what Allyson Newton has called "the occlusion of maternity" in her analysis of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. Newton argues that in the tale "the maternal... is appropriated by processes of patriarchal continuance and paternal succession... that occlude the maternality upon which lineage and succession are dependent." I will be using Newton's term both to illuminate Anglo-Saxon instances of the occlusion of maternity and to seek examples of maternal genealogy that has not been occluded, even by largely patriarchal textual transmission.

Chapter 2 analyzes the familial relationships among Anglo-Saxon religious women of the late seventh and early eighth centuries. The royal abbesses of this period were almost all related to each other, by blood or by marriage, and the analysis reveals that the founding and maintenance of monasteries followed a pattern during this time: on land that she controlled, a royal widow founded a monastery with links to Frankish Gaul, then passed her abbacy to a close blood relative, who could have been either widow or virgin. This chapter provides detailed analyses of the relationships among the abbesses of Ely, Whitby, and Minster-in-Thanet, with briefer examinations of Minster-in-Sheppey, Wimborne, Barking, Lyminge, and Much Wenlock. The manuscript fragment of London, Lambeth Palace MS 427, folio 210 hints at the maternal practice of a ritual of greeting a female blood relative into such a community.

Chapter 3 reexamines the family tree of Æðelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, with an emphasis on its neglected, female side. As is usually noted, Æðelflæd was the daughter and sister of two kings of Wessex (Alfred the Great and Edward the Elder, respectively), but she also had a maternal genealogy of women who provided role models for her maternal performance of governance. This genealogy includes her grandmother Osburh, her mother Ealhswið, her paternal aunt Æðelswið, and her daughter Ælfwynn. Æðelflæd's reign in Mercia, a subkingdom of Wessex, was characterized by compromise, defense, and reduction of violence whenever possible. In addition, at St. Mary's, Nunnaminster, the female side of the West Saxon royal house may have created a monastic matrilineal genealogy like those of the great double monasteries of the seventh and eighth centuries.

Chapter 4 examines the mothers in that most canonical of Old English poems, Beowulf, examining their performances and speeches to provide a critical framework that reveals the active discouragement of maternal practice in the cultural world of Beowulf. Because of the poem's focus on men, this chapter of necessity deals with mothers of sons rather than mothers of daughters. Individual readings of each of the five mothers of in the poem -- Modþryðo, Grendel's Mother, Hildeburh, Hygd, and Wealhþeow -- lead to the realization that maternal performers in Beowulf explicitly do not want their sons to succeed to the throne. The violence of the heroic ethos is a constant threat to children, grown or not, and in the course of the poem only Wealhþeow's maternal performance is fully successful.

The content of these chapters was guided partly by availability of sources (there is a relative wealth of charters about Minster-in-Thanet, for example). More importantly, each chapter's focus is on mothers whose interactions with their children are not blurred by their relations with other textual traditions. For example, the relationship of the Virgin Mary with Christ in Advent (also called Christ I), like that of Elene with her son Constantine in Elene, is deeply colored by church history and patristic tradition in a way that the relative textual isolation of Wealhþeow's with her young sons is not. Similarly, each of the chapters takes an oft-studied, canonical text -- Bede's History, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Beowulf -- and reads against it for indications of maternal practice, often supplementing its information with other, less-read texts (the c a Halgan, or the charters, or the Chronicle of Æðelweard).

The division between literary and historical texts is always blurry in medieval studies, especially in Anglo-Saxon texts, where "history" and "literature" frequently reside next to each other -- witness the poetic sections of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or Bede's History as obvious examples. While this book begins with "history" and ends with "literature," I approach all of the texts with an eye to their literary structures, manuscript contexts, and critical histories. The nature of the extant textual record necessitates a focus on royal and aristocratic women, whose existences and names have been, to some extent, preserved. Throughout this study of upper-class maternal performers, there resonate, however faintly, hints of lower-and working-class maternal performers, the invisible poor mothers who endeavored as well to protect, nurture, and teach their children.