The session’s purpose is to provide scholars investigating various ways violence is gendered in early medieval English literature the opportunity to present papers encouraging cross-methodological approaches, hopefully culminating in rich and collaborative discussion leading to new insights. Recent years have yielded continuous preoccupation and increased interest in interdisciplinary research on the relationships between gender and violence in the Middle Ages and in medieval texts. Such studies go beyond readily accepted interpretations of violence as a masculine enterprise and of women as its victims to seek nuance and complexity through approaches comprising some combination of literary, linguistic, archaeological, and historical studies. Recent studies in this vein include Klaus van Eickel’s 2004 article on castration as gendered violence (masculinity, torture, legal, historical studies); Sara Butler’s 2007 book on the language of abuse in marital discord (linguistics, legal studies, historical records); Peggy McCracken’s 2010 study of literary depictions of blood (gender, culture, religion, literature); Anne Grauer and Andrew Miller’s 2017 bioarchaeological study examining skeletons exhibiting signs of physical trauma against the Calendar of Patent Rolls; and Melissa Ridley Elmes’s 2019 cultural and literary historical analysis of representations of gender and violence in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, among others.

While gender and feminist theorists have done much to refine methodologies used in this research in the later Middle Ages, there remains work to be done regarding gendered violence in earlier English literature. Old English Saints’ lives, in particular, constitute a fruitful starting point: because by definition every saint is also a martyr, every saint’s body is a site of violence. Inherent within these stories, then, is an explicit and essential relationship between violence and the body upon which it is visited, male, female, trans, and nonbinary, as scholars such as Sharon Horner, Martha Easton, and Larissa Tracy have shown. We therefore begin the session with Abby Palmisano’s presentation, “Doubled in Glory: Violence, Miracles, and the Female Body in Ælfric’s Lives of St. Agatha and St. Lucy.” Palmisano demonstrates that Ælfric’s accounts of Agatha and Lucy are highly dialogical, operating as a device to examine the dynamic relationship between body, soul, and will, arguing that Ælfric makes use of sexual violence against the female body as a trope through which to examine his own philosophical interests.

The session continues with Becky Straple-Sovers’ “Weary Warriors and Violent Virgins: Masculine and Feminine Violence in Old English Verse Saints’ Lives.” Straple-Sovers examines nuances of bodily movement and stillness in Andreas, Guthlac A, Judith, and Juliana to argue that these poets deploy a specific cultural understanding of the body and its movement in relation to early medieval English norms of masculinity and femininity and the conventions of heroism and violence, only to ultimately subvert these norms and conventions in their construction of their subjects as male and female Christian heroes.

Finally, Una Creedon-Carey turns to a literary genre seriously understudied in terms of gender representations and their implications for text and audience in “Distributed Agencies: Pursuing Consent in the Exeter Book Riddles.” She analyzes three of these riddles to show that while these texts present models of distributed agency, and the women in them at times become active grammatical subjects, a woman’s consent is nevertheless violated in each riddle. Using Mel Chen’s and Eunjung Kim’s intersectional work on queer and disability theory, she argues that reading these riddles for object agency must entail an understanding of agency as more than simply grammatical subjecthood, and of cultural perceptions of movement and liveliness as hierarchical and exclusionary.

All three presentations approach their subject from disparate and exciting critical perspectives and interrogate the perception and nature of gendered violence in Old English literature in ways that should appeal and be accessible to scholars working on similar themes in other historical periods. Organized by an MLA standing forum and a society dedicated to equity and inclusionary principles, our session features Carissa Harris, a senior scholar well-known for her work on gender and violence, as presider and respondent for these three advanced doctoral students, supporting our own and the MLA’s ongoing mission to offer professionalization opportunities to the next generation of scholars.