9 - Not So Silent After All: Women Intellectuals and Readers in Medieval Oxford

Summary

Catherine Innes-Parker had a gift for honouring distinguished women scholars by reading them deeply, and so it is only fitting, and indeed now urgent, for us to do the same for her. In a brilliant essay on widowhood and the Corpus revisions of Ancrene Wisse written to celebrate Margaret Wade Labarge, Innes-Parker re-evaluated Eric Dobson's somewhat discredited thesis regarding the anchoress sisters, Loretta and Annora de Braose, and the early dedicatees of Ancrene Wisse. Instead, Innes-Parker astutely argued that the de Braose sisters exemplified:

the kind of audience imagined by the authors of the Ancrene Wisse Group and, in particular, by the author of Ancrene Wisse as he revised his original text. While there is no direct evidence for any connection between these women and the Ancrene Wisse Group authors (pace Dobson), there are several interconnections between thirteenth-century manuscripts and the de Braose kin.

Innovatively using modern approaches to manuscript ownership and trans-mission, she found new meaning in Dobson's intriguing but troubled thesis. I have always been grateful to Innes-Parker for her characteristically kind and professional reading: not long before his death, Professor Dobson (another characteristically kind person) had taught me and many other green postgrad-uates at Oxford his introductory course on Textual Criticism (1978–9), drawing on his deep knowledge of the editorial challenges of Ancrene Wisse, and his unfailing love for its prose. I like to imagine now what great conversa-tions he and Catherine are having in a more ‘peaceable kingdom’.

Innes-Parker's 2011 essay, however, is so multi-faceted that I’ve since returned to it many times, more recently for a new literary history of medieval Oxford, a topic mostly studied as an impregnable male domain. Innes- Parker, however, had been interested in reconstructing intelligent women's thought in the Oxford area (Iffley and Godstow) and in how women recluses interacted with several major male theologians. The broader implications of her essay, I believe, have yet to be fully realized, given that her widows ‘were women of consequence – socially well-connected, wealthy, sophisticated, politically astute, and theologically knowledgeable’. She manages to change our sense of these enclosed women: no longer just the passive recipients of clerical guidance, Innes-Parker's recluses had agency, wielding power as patronesses and learned women in their own right. In the wake of her work, it is no longer possible to regard women in the anchorholds as peripheral to society, or indeed as silent.