Brittany Orton

Thesis

Structures of Early Pre-Conquest Queenship: Examining the Royal Women of the Early Mercian Kingdom

Supervisor: Mary Garrison

Research

My thesis delves into the features and structures that constituted the roles of queens and the nascent idea of queenship in the early pre-Conquest kingdom of Mercia during the seventh and eighth centuries. I am particularly interested in matrilineal (kinship) networks and how these networks can be perceived through a feminine political lens, rather then a masculine one. This necessarily expands our perspective of how early medieval royal women functioned within and outside their allotted spaces. To examine these women, I look at various sources, but I particularly focus on Bede's Historia ecclesiastica and a multitude of early and late saints' vitae including (but not limited to) the Vita Cuthberti, Vita Mildrethae, and Vita Mildburgae. By combining these disparate sources, this dissertation hopes to create a more nuanced picture of these royal women and a more detailed understanding of how they operated in and subverted the patriarchal world.

Papers and publications

• 'Osthryth and Bardney: evidence for women's agency in monastic matrilineal kinship networks'. Paper presented at the 2022 Gender and Medieval Studies Conference. Paris, France, January 5, 2022.
• 'Recovering the Political Use of Kinship Networks by the Queens of Early Medieval England: A Re-Examining of the Historia ecclesiastica and Vita Wilfridi'. Paper presented at the 2021 International Congress on Medieval Studies. Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 14, 2021.