England's First Female Author?

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England's First Female Author?

Whitby is famous for her literary links. Caedmon, England's oldest poet, composed poetry in the seventh century for Abbess Hilda of Whitby, and the town was home to Bram Stoker, who set the myth of Dracula on the path to world-wide fame.

But, according to the Leeds University journal _Northern History_, it seems that Whitby was home to another writer, and she was a woman -- a nun at Anglo-Saxon monastery. This is what is argued now in a paper published there by Dr Andrew Breeze, of the University of Navarre in Pamplona, Spain.

The evidence comes from a unique manuscript at the monastery of St Gall, Switzerland. It contains an anonymous Latin life of St Gregory the Great, the Pope who in 597 sent St Augustine as a missionary to England. Ever since this Latin life was discovered in the nineteenth century, it has been famous for containing stories which were later retold by the Venerable Bede. The best-known of these is the tale of how the young Gregory saw English youths for sale in the slave-market at Rome. He asked where they came from, and was told that they were Angles. Gregory made a joke, saying that they were so handsome that they should be called 'angels, not Angles'.

The oldest text to contain this anecdote is the anonymous life, and everyone agrees that it was written at Whitby, since it refers more than once to the monastery there and the nuns who ran it. It is also agreed that the text was written before 714, and probably after 704. It has even been suggested that the author was a nun, and not a monk, because the community at Whitby was a mixed one, ruled by an abbess. But nobody has sat down to set out the evidence from the text until now.

What emerges from careful reading of the Latin life is that the author was a fervent local patriot with an ardent devotion to St Gregory. This we might expect. She was also, which is more surprising, a bit of a snob and a man-hater with a strong sadistic streak. In addition, she had serious problems with grammar and spelling.

So the anonymous life has three peculiarities. There are several stories of women, and the women always come out of them with dignity and even respect. Men, in contrast, are consistently seen as treacherous, incompetent, or threatening, and deserving of violent punishment. The problems with spelling and grammar, which mean that even experienced scholars cannot always work out what the writer meant, would be explained by the educational limitations for women at this date, when education was effectively a male monopoly.

One of the writer's stories is set in the time of the Roman emperor Trajan. He is marching off to war at the head of his troops, when a widow brings him and the whole army to a stop. Some of Trajan's men have killed her son, and she asks for justice. He promises to do her justice when he returns. But she points out that he may not come back alive, and so the emperor takes her point and gives her compensation with money that he is carrying. The influence that a poor widow exerted over the Emperor of Rome would flatter any woman.

In contast are other men and sadism against them. This comes out in three places. Some royal messengers arrive in Rome from Gaul. They are given relics to give to their king, but are not satisfied with them, saying their king would have them executed if they did not bring him something better. (Eventually Gregory puts matters right.) Another story concerns a priest, who is flogged with a whip because he does not do as he is told. The worst story is of a bad pope who came after Gregory's time, and who is kicked on the head until he is dead. The woman who seemingly wrote this life had violent feelings on men, whether or not she was conscious of it. Since men dominated society, perhaps this reaction is not surprising. But the author is quick to praise the abbesses of royal blood who ruled Whitby monastery, stressing their social connections with more than a touch of snobbery.

If what Dr Andrew Breeze says is true, another woman writer from medieval Britain can be recognized. People will read the life of St Gregory with greater care, as providing a picture of eighth-century Yorkshire and beyond as seen through a woman's eyes. They will notice how she overcame imposed limitations of education to write her text, so that she should now attract world-wide interest as England's earliest female author. Just as Whitby can boast that it was home to Caedmon, England's oldest poet, so also Whitby can boast that it was home to this unknown nun, the oldest English woman writer. Women's writing is today regarded more seriously than ever. Whitby can proclaim from now on that, as far as English-speakers are concerned, it began here!

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