Elaine Treharne (Stanford University) presents: "Medieval Male and Female Religious Institutions and their Scribal Practices"

With a response from Fiona Griffiths. 

Please see below for a post-workshop reflection from Professor Treharne.

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On inherited scholarship and its legacy

Elaine Treharne

In his letter to Bishop Wærferth in c.890, King Alfred (who was ‘Great’, after all), acknowledged the significance of those who had gone before:

"Our ancestors, who held these places before us, loved wisdom, and through it they obtained wealth and left it to us. Here we can still see their footprints…"

While Alfred goes on to lament the fact that people continued to see the footprints but failed to follow in them, we, as scholars, are trained to recognize thoroughly the achievements of those who’ve preceded us intellectually and academically. We must continue to acknowledge the debt we owe to predecessors in our fields—we cannot do what we do without their work—but we must also be deeply alert to inherited biases within the scholarship that we read. In relation to our current understanding of the contribution of women throughout global history, Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has trenchantly stated what is at stake (“Silence, Sources and Medieval Women: From Alien Bride to Spiritual Director,” in Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages: Giving Voice to Silence. Essays in Honour of Catherine Innes-Parker, ed. Cate Gunn, Liz Herbert McAvoy, and Naoë Kutika Yoshikawa [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2023], pp. 22-41, at 227):

"The world of late medieval women’s francophone literate practices and traditions in England remains a relatively silent corpus of sources, silenced not in the Middle Ages…but in post-national modern disciplinary formations and scholarly practice.

The scholarly silence is paralleled and amplified in contemporary culture. The silence of medieval women is to a large extent a modern invention, promoted in a culture of still only partly ameliorated structural misogyny, and driven by the self-flattering myth of women’s progress, which positions the Middle Ages as the outstanding location of misogyny in order to see our own times as better."

This powerful statement can be extended to other structures of bias entrenched since the modern university was formed which have systematically maintained the marginalization of those outside that structure-building. Wogan-Browne (and I) advocate that we challenge these biases from their very foundations, re-examining the evidence that survives to us, and finally hearing those voices present in the record that have all too often been ignored.