I’ve been trying to write a paper about representations of lordship in Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon literature (one of the reasons I’ve not been blogging much recently), and I keep on coming back to a central problem: why are there differences between Old English and Carolingian Latin poetry and literature in terms of themes? It’s a more difficult question than it seems at first.

The normal take on this is that Old English and Latin literatures are completely different – in fact, so different, that they’re not normally even discussed together (or there will be a focus on one language alone, with a few side glances at the other language). What those ignoring one of the languages don’t explain is why this exclusion is appropriate (other than that a different academic department deals with the topic, which is not really a good excuse).

One argument about why you might keep the literature separate is that language is so crucial to meaning. Latin and Old English literature are different because the language used made the authors think in different ways. There is some evidence for the incompatibility of languages for some specific areas. For example, studies of Anglo-Saxon words for colours suggest a different classification system than the modern one. However, this explanation doesn’t really work for what I’m interested in, which is why some prominent themes in OE heroic poetry are less common in near contemporary Latin poems. I can’t imagine that there are concepts in OE which can’t be expressed in Latin (though there might be the other way round, because OE has fewer abstract nouns). And while there are differences in specific poetic form and style (e.g. Latin doesn’t have the kennings and alliterative half lines of OE), that shouldn’t make a difference to more general motifs. If Carolingian poets could describe the baptism of a Danish prince in Virgilian terms (as Ermoldus does), they are not being unduly restricted by their poetic form.

Another possibility is that OE and Carolingian Latin poetry were being written by different kinds of authors for a different sort of audience. But given that we have almost no knowledge of who the authors or the audience were for OE poetry (it’s largely deduced from the poems themselves), that doesn’t get me much further as an explanation.

One reason that’s often been used to explain the difference of OE poetry is the existence of a pre-Christian oral poetry tradition in Anglo-Saxon England. Carolingian Francia, by contrast, is a long time after the initial conversions of at least the Frankish elite. There are some problems with this argument, however. Oral composition is unlikely to be making any difference to whether or not some particular motifs are used (as opposed to influencing structure/diction of poem). And all the OE poetry we have has had Christian influence on it in its current form. Pre-Christian elements have to be deduced, with more or less plausibility from a later version.

The stage of Christianisation probably does make some difference about some types of poetry being produced. For example, versified books of the Bible seem to be to be something that is likely to come in at an earlier religious stage than the Carolingians were at. So they don’t have an equivalent to the OE Genesis, the OS Heliand or the Christian Latin epics of the patristic period (Arator and the like). Also, there is a fair bit of OE poetry about Germanic heroes, more than in Francia (where it’s really just Waltharius). Again, maybe this indicates a stronger pre-Christian tradition that is then adapted into OE Christian poetry.

My interest, however, is in secular heroic poetry, where religious developments shouldn’t have so much impact. Specifically, Michael Cherniss, Ingeld and Christ: heroic concepts and values in Old English Christian poetry. (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), sees four motifs as core in OE poetry: loyalty, vengeance, wealth and exile. His argument for the importance of these themes largely holds up. It seems to me that Carolingian poetry certainly shares an interest in treasure, and to a lesser extent, vengeance. It doesn’t, however, have much to say about loyalty and exile. Why not?

One possible answer is to say that social conditions were different – but the problem is we don’t know what the social conditions were in Anglo-Saxon England at the key moments. There are only a couple of OE secular poems securely dated (as in within about 20 years). Beowulf (by far the longest and most important OE poetical text) gets placed anywhere between the seventh and the tenth century, putting it in completely different relations to the religious development at the time, structures of kingship and the Vikings depending on where you place it. If you look specifically at the ninth century, Francia and Anglo-Saxon England do look very similar, socially and militarily (a key point for battle poems). For some of the OE texts that you can date to the ninth and tenth century, I’m then arguing that different political situations cause the different uses of themes. But I’m aware that this doesn’t touch the wider problem of the difference between the two literatures. Evoking a ‘different poetic tradition’ is just a black box, it doesn’t tell you why different paths have been taken in fairly similar circumstances. I don’t know whether you can pin down the reasons for OE poetry: the evidence just doesn’t seem to exist to come up with definitive answers. But I do wish that someone other than me (not an expert on Anglo-Saxon history, let alone literature) could at least consider this question.

Last night, I was at the twentieth anniversary celebration of the Women’s History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research. A large and distinguished group of historians were there and Ann Curthoys spoke on ‘The Impact of Feminist History on Theories of History’. It was a very rapid whiz-through of the changing ways in which feminist historians had thought and wrote about history.

I call myself a feminist and a historian, but I’m not sure I’m a feminist historian. So the event got me thinking about the relationship between feminism and history in my life. In some ways they’re not that closely connected. I didn’t choose my field of study with a particular feminist political purpose, as some historians have done. I chose it because I was interested first of all in a specific historical era (Carolingian) and then a particular social/intellectual level (the court and intellectual life at it). Most feminist historians work on the modern period (or at least early modern/late medieval) - there’s simply more evidence for the activities of women in those periods and more sources written by them. And if you’re trying to change society, then recent history often seems far more politically relevant - a lot of feminist work over the years has been in some ways a genealogy of feminist thought and movements.

It is possible to do women’s history for the early medieval period, but looking back I think I may have unconsciously shied away from that area. I think my very limited knowledge of women’s history at the time I was becoming a historian was very much that it was all about the oppression of women by men and thus depressing (if accurate) or politically biased (if less accurate). Ann Curthoys mentioned in her talk how there was a debate within feminist historian circles in the late 1970s about whether there should be more emphasis on women’s agency and less on oppression. I think that has taken a long time to filter into medieval women’s history - there are still some prominent American medievalists who largely subscribe to a view of men’s inevitable aim as oppressing women. (I can name names if anyone’s interested).

I ended up doing gender history almost by chance - my PhD was originally going to be on moral tracts for laypeople. However since I had Jinty Nelson (a very good feminist historian) as my supervisor, saying that I must consider gender as a category, it ended up being about moral tracts for laymen and masculinity as well as nobility. (There was such an imbalance in the material that I couldn’t really write about advice to women in the same thesis).

Where my feminism did come in was that it made me receptive to using theoretical insights about gender when I started reading up on them. The social construction of roles and their variability over time made a lot of sense to me both professionally, but also at a personal level. What history gave to my feminism was a grounding in its theory that it had previously lacked. Looking back, I realise how my feminism as a young woman was almost entirely non-intellectual, uninfluenced by all the key texts. It came instinctively from an aversion to the domestic life my mother led, an anger at boys at my school saying that men were better at everything than women, and a desire for the intellectual life that focused on the un-feminine subject of mathematics. What feminist theory I learned over the years before I became a historian was largely stuff I got from TV and newspapers.

One of the conclusions of the talk and the discussion after it was that women’s history had now become more mainstream in most areas of history (though not all - someone pointed out the Cambridge school of intellectual history as being very resistant still). Maybe the same thing has happened to feminism as well, at least in the UK (I’m less sure about the USA). If I don’t see myself as a feminist historian it’s because I don’t need to in the same way that historians in the 1970s did. I can mostly take it for granted that as a woman studying history and as a historian studying gender I will be taken seriously and not discriminated against. Maybe that’s what feminist history and feminism more generally has achieved - to make at least some feminism historic, part of an accepted, taken for granted past.

There was a good article in the Guardian last week by Po Bronson on ‘the mummy wars’ (http://money.guardian.co.uk/workweekly/story/0,,1794292,00.html). This looked at the arguments between working mothers and stay at home mothers about which form of motherhood was better. Bronson asked why the arguments were so heated when there was actually so little difference in practice between the two sides - most mothers are not putting their children into day care full-time and the results for children are not overwhelmingly different.

This got me thinking about who was actually doing the warring - and I’m not convinced that it is mainly down to mothers (who usually have much of their time and energy absorbed by more urgent matters, like reading stories and trying to get their children to eat their vegetables and not pick their nose). Instead, this argument seems to me to be driven by rather different interest groups.

On the stay at home side (or rather, the anti-working mother side), there is a peculiar alliance. On the one hand, there’s the expected group of traditionalists who think mothers shouldn’t be working. There are two main sub-divisions of this group - religious (God wants mothers to stay at home) and evolutionary/biological (mothers really want to stay at home), but there’s not much difference between their outlook in practice.

However, in the stay at home alliance, they have some unlikely allies in the child-centred experts. There are some fairly eminent child psychologists (Penelope Leach, Steve Biddulph etc) who aren’t naturally right-wing, but who end up advocating much the same position. Essentially, they work from the assumption that what really matters is what is best for the baby/child (fair enough), but with the unspoken addition: regardless of its effects on the parents. You only have to read some of the dogmatic statements (and they are very dogmatic) about breastfeeding to realise that the wellbeing of mothers is secondary to them.

In theory such experts aren’t sexist: they support either parent doing the nurturing. However they call for extended periods of demand-led breastfeeding and for the pre-school child to be away from a parent (or a close relative) for only very short periods a day. So in practice, unless you’re unusually lucky in your job and family circumstances, this means full-time motherhood for at least four years.

The other side in the ‘mummy wars’, the anti-stay at home mother side, is usually seen vaguely to be lead by ‘feminists’. In fact, while feminists are positive about working mothers and want to support them, I’m not convinced that many feminists are actually hostile to stay-at-home mothers. A lot of them (like myself) wouldn’t personally want to be full-time mothers and there’s a fair bit of low-level sniping about the boring nature of being at home with children and its effect on your outlook. But I can’t think of many feminists who argue that women shouldn’t be stay at home mothers.

What really drives the anti full-time mothers, I would say, is capitalism and its supporters. The current government, for example, doesn’t like the thought of mothers not in paid employment and is clearly not interested in providing support for them. Similarly, the ‘feminists’ who really oppose stay at home mothers are people like Linda Hirshman (see my comments in Dec 2005/Jan 2006) who have completely absorbed the values of capitalism and think that the only measure of a worthwhile job is that it highly paid.

Given these powerful interest groups involved in the mummy wars, I don’t think they’re going to vanish any time soon. But I think mothers should be wary of getting involved - it’s not clear that any of these groups have really got our interests at heart.

I found a wonderful fact out by chance while reading Asser's life of Alfred the Great. Many Anglo-Saxon place-names include the suffixes 'ham' (roughly 'settlement') and 'ing' (roughly 'the tribe of', follwing a leader's name). So what about Nottingham? The earliest version is probably 'Snotengaham' - the settlement was probably therefore founded by the Anglian family/tribe of Snot.

I stumbled across two bizarre articles by right-wing ‘thinkers’ last week, which shared a common thread, although they had very different main themes. The Weekly Standard (http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=12266&R=ECBD396FA) was deploring polygamy (and also indirectly gay marriage, on the grounds that once you redefine marriage to include new forms, you cannot then stop its extension to other forms. To which the short answer is, of course you can. Saying that mixed-race marriages were allowed in the US didn’t automatically mean that gay marriage was). Meanwhile Roger Scruton was castigating Francis Fukayama for his universalist beliefs (http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=3&debateId=137&articleId=3605). (Scruton also claims that the European Union is ‘dedicated to extinguishing not only the national loyalties of the European people, but also the Christian culture and democratic institutions that had thrived in them’, which suggests an EU with far more vision and purpose than anything we’ve seen lately).

The link between the articles was democracy, or at least the preconditions of it. In response to Fukayama’s view of the urge for democracy as universal, Roger Scruton says ‘the march of history towards liberal democracy is a local achievement of Christian culture.’ Meanwhile the Weekly Standard article showed the bizarre train of thought that monogamy was what made democracy possible, because monogamy led to the love marriage and hence concern about the rights of the individual. In contrast, polygamy produces autocracy.

A few minutes thought would provide sufficient counter-examples to test and reject both theories, should testing the theories be what the authors intended. (Of course, it isn’t - the point is to show that the Other (Muslims, liberals etc) is inferior to us). Classical Athens managed democracy without Christianity, love matches or concerns for universal human rights (no rights for slaves). India has managed well democratically despite a tradition of arranged marriages. The Western countries in the lead in the eighteenth century on the theories of human rights and democracy were Revolutionary France (anti-religious) and the United States (whose Founding Fathers tended to be Deists rather than Christians).

I don’t know if anyone has done rigorous scholarly studies on the characteristics that help countries sustain democracy and those that hinder it. It’d be difficult to do without triumphalism, but it would be a useful exercise. Anything to counter the fantasies both of Fukayama (that democracy is the default condition of humanity) and right-wingers who think that ‘lesser breeds’ must remain permanently ‘without the law’.