ABSTRACT
Women who fulfilled their vocations within regularly constituted monasteries—mynecena, cloistered women—were contrasted in the vernacular literature with no less devout women who satisfied their spiritual aspirations while remaining in the world: nunnan, vowesses. The historian who most effectively applied that legal material to the situations of actual religious women in this period was Dorothy Whitelock. Early Anglo-Saxon religious houses for women, like their later counterparts, sustained close associations with the families, noble as well as royal, that had endowed them and were treated by their founders within broader dynastic and territorial strategies. The religious life afforded women in the pre-Viking Age the opportunity to control their own estates actively, retaining in large measure their aristocratic lifestyle while directing their prayerful devotion towards the commemoration of their kin. The aim of cataloguing all the congregations of veiled women active in England between the accession of Alfred and the Norman Conquest seems unachievable.
