With Symbolic Reproduction in Early Medieval England: Secular and Monastic Households, Katharine Sykes offers a bold, even playful proposition, which builds upon her previous work on religious life in early and central medieval England. Through her research on so-called “double houses” and on the Order of Sempringham, Sykes had already proven her ability to treat a wide array of sources. Some of her previous publications also showcased her willingness to engage with various theoretical frameworks, such as Frank Kermode’s temporal regimes or Pierre Bourdieu’s model of capital. Sykes brings together these strengths in this new monograph.
The book’s aim is ambitious: it seeks to chart the longue durée developments of early medieval English society between 600 and 1100, as it underwent periods of transformation such as the Viking invasions, the mutation familiale as well as the mutation bénédictine. It does so through the prism of the household, both lay and religious. The originality of the work lies in its approach. First, we may underscore its eclectic use of theory, drawing on anthropology, sociology as much as psychoanalysis, and its blend of different types of sources, from hagiography to archeological evidence. Another outstanding feature consists of the fact that it tackles secular and religious households side by side. Medieval theologians might have emphasized the distinction between the earthly and the spiritual, leading modern historians to examine secular and monastic households separately, but in truth, as Sykes’ analysis demonstrates, the two were in constant dialogue with one another.
The four – hefty, given their forty- to fifty-page count – chapters present three to four case studies. They each operate according to their own conceptual framework and their assorted metaphorical language. While certain discussions delve into close readings of the sources, others rather survey a text’s structure, its inclusions and omissions. Sykes frequently situates herself within the current scholarship, providing her own against-the-grain interpretations.
In the first chapter, Sykes investigates material evidence from burial sites, Adhelm’s De virginitate, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, and early English saints’ lives, through the lens of Nancy Chodorow’s psychoanalytic model. She highlights the gendered dimension of the experience and representation of the religious life, and the sophisticated ways in which authors would wield the imagery of the family to various ends. For instance, Adhelm’s use of the (feminine) symbol of the bee allowed him to depict male religious leaders generating spiritual offspring without having recourse to female bodies. Different models, tropes, and trajectories were thus available for religious men as opposed to religious women. For men, asceticism was portrayed as an elite activity, akin to joining an élite warband. Religious men, moreover, enjoyed more mobility and opportunities for learning, whereas religious women were often depicted as needing male support. Ex-queens were more likely than former kings to head a mixed-sex community, similar to the royal court over which they used to preside.
The second chapter relies upon the work of Bourdieu and of anthropologists Gayle Rubin and Annette Weiner to explore the valuation and circulation of individuals, especially women. Sykes argues that Christianity altered the status of virginity and the rules around brokering marriages. Élites could now build their capital by allocating their resources in new ways, like consecrating a daughter who was then turned into an ‘alienable possession,’ preserved from the secular marriage market, yet able to reproduce spiritually. Throughout her discussion, Sykes strikingly juxtaposes Bede and Aldhelm’s metaphors about gold and silver or Boniface’s letters with numismatic developments from the seventh to the ninth centuries.
The third chapter focuses on the Vita Ælfredi, “King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries,” and the Vita Ædwardi regis, and reveals how the imagery of paternity and reproduction was deployed differently in each work. For example, the childless Edward is represented as a flower, a symbol for asexual reproduction, deemed superior to its biological counterpart. Sykes puts the Lacanian’s model of the ego to good use as she probes at the construction of the royal persona, contending that such method “is not a piece of post-structuralist anachronism… it is a way of reading that would have been second nature… to a monastic audience trained in exegetical interpretation” (p. 112). She hence skillfully dissects the structure of a narrative like the Vita Ælfredi, and argues that what may appear to modern readers as digressions from an orderly timeline, might in fact play a meaningful symbolic function.
Sykes devotes the last chapter to the cults of three female saints, Æthelthryth of Ely, Æthelburg of Barking, and Mildrith of Minster-in-Thanet. These saints from the Golden Age of monasticism in the late seventh and eight centuries were the object of hagiographical revivals upon the occasion of the translation of their relics around the turn of the millennium. This time, Sykes draws on the work of feminist thinkers Julia Kristeva and Luce Iragaray, and on textile metaphors to consider how these women’s lives were stitched back together by writers like Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. This patchwork process exposes what each local community wished to put on display or to render invisible.
Symbolic Reproduction in Early Medieval England: Secular and Monastic Households is an inventive monograph that manages to connect a broad range of sources through an interdisciplinary approach. It demonstrates the complexity and the intertextuality of the medieval symbolic repertoire, which was constantly renewed across the centuries. The image of the mother or the father, of the bee or the coin could ever be reworked to address a changing religious landscape or pressing political demands. While the book focuses on early medieval England, its imaginative methodology could inspire historians and literature specialists alike, whether they study the British Isles or not.
