Reform and Resistance

Helene Scheck is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsList of Abbreviations 1. Women in/and Early Ecclesiastical Culture: An Overview 2. The Limits of Orthodoxy: Being Female and Female Being under Charlemagne 3. Soul Searching: Alcuin of York and His Circle of Female Scholars 4. Redressing the Female Subject: Women, Transvestite Saints, and the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine Reform 5. Resounding Silences: Mary and Eve in Anglo-Saxon Reform Literature 6. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Claiming Her Voice 7. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Recasting Female Subjectivities ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

"This challenging new book urges scholars to think hard about female personhood and its elusive relationships to hegemonic discourses on women and femininity, while modeling the difficulties of this kind of scholarly inquiry and the complex conceptual frameworks in which it must be conducted … Reform and Resistance is an exciting, and at times inspiring, study that challenges us to recognize the difficulties of understanding female subjectivity in the early Middle Ages, while elucidating the rich potential of bringing a comparative, interdisciplinary approach to this subject." — Journal of English and Germanic Philology"Helene Scheck has given us an erudite and original study that is not for the faint of heart … Reform and Resistance offers new ways to think about the lives and portrayals of women in the early Middle Ages and is an important contribution to ongoing, increasingly complex and nuanced conversations about medieval women and gender." — H-France Review"…ambitious in subject and scope … Reform and Resistance raises important questions about the development of ideas of women … [and] helps to fill the need for comparative studies of medieval women." — Speculum – A Journal of Medieval Studies"This book connects Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Latin material to the fascinating work of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. This connection has seldom, if ever, been made, and yet Scheck not only makes it but also explores it fully. She opens up new ways of reading both traditions. I also like the emphasis placed on Anglo-Latin and ecclesiastical culture, since it is more common for studies of women in the early Middle Ages to focus on vernacular and lay traditions." — Shari Horner, author of The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English Literature