ABSTRACT
Bede’s double inscription of Aethelthryth in both narrative and hymn interrupts the temporal linearity of his Historia Ecclesiastica just as her adamant refusal of dynastic reproduction disrupts and threatens the futurity of the Northumbrian royal line. Her militant choice of virginity over marriage and of eternity over worldly time provides a female model for the male community to whom and for whom Bede writes. Bede dismantles binary gender as time-bound, but he does so by appropriating women’s lived experience and literary expression. As both historical subject and devotional object, Aethelthryth thus constitutes a pivotal but problematic figure in Bede’s theoretical engagement with the entanglement of temporality, sexuality, and gender that underwrites monastic identity, male and female, in early medieval England.
