Double agents
Subtitle: women and clerical culture in Anglo-Saxon England
By: Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing.
Contributors: Overing, Gillian R., 1952-
Series: The Middle Ages series
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 244
Subjects: Christian literature, English (Old) -- History and criticism.; Christian literature, Latin (Medieval and modern) -- England -- History and criticism.; Women -- Religious life -- England -- History -- To 1500.; Feminism and literature -- England -- History -- To 1500.; Women and literature -- England -- History -- To 1500.; Women -- England -- History -- Middle Ages, 500-1500.; Clergy -- England -- History -- To 1500.; Social history -- Medieval, 500-1500.; Rhetoric, Medieval.; Great Britain -- History -- Anglo-Saxon period, 449-1066.; England -- Social conditions -- 1066-1485.
Description: "Obviously a part of the social fabric of Anglo-Saxon England, women are nevertheless accorded an obscure and slender role in the textual archive of masculine clerical culture. What can this record of patriarchy, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing ask, contribute to the history of women? Double Agents explores the meaning and implications of women's absence and presence in the partial history of Anglo-Saxon culture.".

"Rather than recovering the details of exceptional women's lives, Double Agents concerns itself with the formation of the cultural record itself, and with women's relation to its processes of production and reception.

By revisiting many familiar issues within the scholarly tradition - orality and literacy, documentation and authenticity sources and analogues ... and by looking at some of the core authors of the period, Bede Aldhelm, and Aelfric, who continue the intellectual traditions of the early Church fathers Lees and Overing address women's entry into the patostic symbolic, the order which authorizes the record itself."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-233) and index.