Social networks of friendship in the writings of early medieval english women

Abstract

Communities of women is a topic in Early Medieval English Studies that has largely been overlooked unless it's researched and discussed in the context of men, marriage, and religion. One obstacle that has prevented scholarship from researching and discussing communities of women outside of patriarchal and religious contexts is the continued focus on male-authored texts. Even though scholarship has progressed towards more feminist readings of the corpus, there is still a problem of which primary sources scholars choose to use as the focus of their feminist arguments. Female-composed texts of this period are often overlooked, are used as references for larger arguments about male-authored texts, or are discussed within male-centered contexts even if those arguments have a feminist lens. On the path to discovering women's perspectives in the corpus, I found that a majority of the sources composed by women were historical documents. These documents include wills and correspondence composed by women and lawsuit records that document the actions of women and their perspectives. These historical documents exhibit rhetorical features that express women's value of social networking, drive to maintain social networks, and desire to form new networks with other women. The main argument presented in this dissertation contends that early medieval English women formed social networks, in some cases friendships, with other women in order to maintain productive networks of women that yielded preservation of their properties and assets, emotional communion with one another, and protection of their persons.