Book contents
- Women’s Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
- Women’s Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Book as Bloodline
- Chapter 2 Records on the Landscape
- Chapter 3 Tracing Mobility
- Chapter 4 Mothers and Messengers
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
Chapter 2 - Records on the Landscape
Landmarks in Audrée, Osith, and Modwenne
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2024
- Women’s Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
- Women’s Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Book as Bloodline
- Chapter 2 Records on the Landscape
- Chapter 3 Tracing Mobility
- Chapter 4 Mothers and Messengers
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
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.
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- Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary ImaginationMatrilineal Legacies in the High Middle Ages, pp. 55 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024