Women in Anglo-Saxon Poetry

The study of mediaeval women has become fashionable in recent years, and the women of Anglo-Saxon England have received their share of scholarly attention. 1 Students of Anglo-Saxon society have used Old English poetry along with archaeology, art and legal documents as evidence for contemporary life. However, this application of literary material has certain inherent limitations since, unlike the other sources of information, we have little or no absolute knowledge about the date or authorship of the poems, the kind of audience for which they were intended or, indeed, the relationship of the extant texts — all in manuscripts dating from the end of the period — to the poems as first composed. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.