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Chapter 2 - Records on the Landscape

Landmarks in Audrée, Osith, and Modwenne

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2024

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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 Imagination
Matrilineal Legacies in the High Middle Ages
, pp. 55 - 88
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Records on the Landscape
  • Emma O. Bérat
  • Book: Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination
  • Online publication: 14 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009434720.004
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  • Records on the Landscape
  • Emma O. Bérat
  • Book: Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination
  • Online publication: 14 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009434720.004
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Records on the Landscape
  • Emma O. Bérat
  • Book: Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination
  • Online publication: 14 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009434720.004
Available formats
×