ABSTRACT
Even ignoring the bishop’s insistence on Benedictine regularity as the defining feature of monasticism, it is hard to identify many places where women religious might have lived in the early years of the tenth century. In the light of the evident discontinuity in female monastic observance across the First Viking Age, this apparent profusion of late Anglo-Saxon female houses might be thought to point to a notable flowering of women’s monasticism after the middle years of the tenth century, to which the rhetoric surrounding the monastic revolution of Edgar’s reign seems, indeed, to bear witness. The tendency of much of the recent scholarly literature has been to enlarge our understanding of the vitality of female monasticism before the Conquest through the collection of as many examples as possible of places where women can be shown to have been living a religious life during the tenth and eleventh centuries.
