You Sound Like a Wif: The Representation of Women's Speech in Old English Literature

This dissertation examines the representation of women’s speech in Pre-Conquest vernacular literature to determine whether early English authors saw speech and gender as inherently connected, either through physical embodiment or performative traits. More specifically, it asks, given the limited extant sources, contemporary perspectives of gender, language, written culture, and current methodological difficulties, can we detect any patterns in the representation of women’s speech across early English vernacular literature? The dissertation employs an innovative combination of traditional literary analysis, translation analysis, computational linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, theology, gender performance theory, and social history to holistically examine every instance of women’s direct speech in all vernacular literature – including prose hagiography, narrative poetry, martyrologies, and secular romance – in its early English context. Through this interdisciplinary method, the dissertation determines that although there are moments in which the gender of the speaker clearly impacts the representation of their speech, these moments are neither consistent nor universal across all pre-Conquest vernacular literature. In all modes of speech, whether prayer or exorcism, there is far more which unites the speech of men and women than divides. Nevertheless, there are exceptions. The most notable of these exceptions is found in Ælfric of Eynsham, who subtly reworks the speech of “evil” women in his "Lives of Saints" to emphasize that not only are these women wicked, but that the evidence of their wickedness is found primarily in their manner of speech. This is consistent with the abbot’s theological and homiletic writings, which uniquely warn against the words of the "oferspræce" (“loquacious”) woman but praise the silence of good women. Furthermore, although Ælfric’s translation practices and homiletic warnings may be exclusive to him, his influence – particularly in twelfth-century vernacular homilies – cannot be ignored. Overall, however, there is little evidence to suggest that Ælfric is representative of all early England, at least when it comes to biases against women’s speech. The corpus of early English literature and discourse resists easy generalizations, whether due to limited extant data or lack of consistency, and this complexity suggests that the representation of women’s speech as inherently immoral was not a universal bias in early medieval England, as it would later become.