What Christians Can Learn from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People about Biblical Womanhood, Part 2
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| Ely Cathedral |
Ely Cathedral is my second-favorite of the medieval cathedrals in England—and the monastery that originally existed on the site was founded by a woman. Her name was Etheldreda, a queen who became a religious leader and then a saint after her death.1 But I am getting ahead of myself.
My last post was a reminder of why it is helpful for Christians to read works from the distant past. Among other benefits, reading works from the past helps us to transcend our contemporary mindset and to see that Christians from other times did not necessarily think as we do. This is the main point of C. S. Lewis’s essay “On the Reading of Old Books” (which inspired my blog title), in which he advises us to avoid “the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.” Reading widely throughout time, advises Lewis, “puts the controversies of the moment” into perspective.2
My friend Beth Allison Barr’s popular book The Making of Biblical Womanhood (Brazos Press, 2021) does a wonderful job of showing how important it is to read about Christians from the past. In particular I like to emphasize reading what those past Christians themselves wrote. This is the best way to see through their eyes and enter into their time (another piece of advice from C. S. Lewis).
This is why I like to read past Christians such as the Venerable Bede, who wrote the first church history book for English-speaking people. Although written in Latin, the language of medieval learning, the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People was THE church history text of England from the 8th century through the Middle Ages.3
Bede was a monk living in northeastern England from A.D. 673-735. In Books 3-4 of his Ecclesiastical History, which cover about a century of church history in England, from the couple of generations preceding Bede through his own lifetime, Bede highlights many women instrumental in the flourishing of the English church.
In my last post I focused on Bede’s account of Abbess Hilda, who founded and ruled over the double monastery, which separately housed monks and nuns, at what is now called Whitby in Yorkshire.
In this post, I will highlight the woman who seems to be Bede’s favorite: Abbess Etheldreda. He devotes two chapters to Etheldreda and even writes a poem in honor of her.
Etheldreda’s is a rather sensational story.
Like Abbess Hilda, who has a lengthy secular life followed by a monastic one (Bede 4.23), Etheldreda has a two-part career (4.19).4 Etheldreda begins her first career as a queen, after initially being married to a prince who dies and then marrying a king. However, her example of biblical womanhood is one which eschews conjugal bliss and chooses “perpetual virginity,” with Etheldreda eventually urging her husband to let her go from her secular responsibilities so that she could join a convent “and serve Christ the only true king” (4.19). The implication here is that it’s not her earthly king-and-husband she feels she should be serving, but the true king: Christ!
Etheldreda, who, according to Bede, is married to King Egfrid for 12 years, refuses to consummate her marriage, so King Egfrid enlists the respected Bishop Wilfrid to plead with Etheldreda to have sex with her husband, even offering the bishop land and money to use his influence with the queen, but to no avail. Instead, Wilfrid supports Queen Etheldreda entering the religious life, and Egfrid gives his “reluctant consent” (4.19).
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| Ely Cathedral |
Bede is so taken with the example of Queen-turned-Abbess Etheldreda that he composes a hymn after her death “in honor of this same queen and bride of Christ—all the more a queen because a bride of Christ.” His hymn praises women martyrs of church history, such as Thecla and Euphemia, concluding with the English example of Etheldreda, who does not die by martyrdom, but is praised for “Scorning the marriage bed,” choosing virginity, and seeking the veil and thereby, it seems, dying to the roles of wife and biological mother (4.20).
Etheldreda’s body, according to Bede, remained undecayed in the grave for several years, as discovered years later by her sister Sexburg, who succeeded Etheldreda as abbess of Ely, when the nuns attempted to move Etheldreda’s body to a new sarcophagus (4.19). Bede gives Etheldreda’s chosen life of virginity as a reason that her body remains incorrupt after death: “For the miraculous preservation of her body from corruption in the tomb is evidence that she had remained untainted by bodily intercourse” (4.19). Forsaking biological motherhood, Etheldreda became, as Bede puts it, “the virgin mother of many virgins vowed to God” (4.19).
As Barr reminds us in her Making of Biblical Womanhood, Christians in the past did not always exalt being a wife and mother as a woman’s highest calling and did not always refuse women a place of authority over men in the church. The faithful church of the distant past also offered the choice of religious careers for women outside the home.
Some examples of these Anglo-Saxon women in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, like Etheldreda, show women forgoing wifehood or traditional motherhood to devote themselves to the religious life, and, again, Bede and other religious leaders he writes about, such as Bishop Wilfrid, praise them for this.5
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| Saint Etheldreda statue, Ely Cathedral |
We can also see with Bede’s examples of these 7th-century abbesses such as Hilda, Etheldreda, Sexburg, and Ebba of the Coldingham monastery that the early church in England saw women’s leadership over these double monasteries (housing monks and nuns) as both fitting and praiseworthy.
In fact, instead of the controversy being about who should be appointed to ministry or allowed to teach whom, the controversy that everyone is genuinely concerned about in Bede’s English church is when they should celebrate Easter—as well as how monks should shave their heads.6
As I’ve sought to demonstrate through the examples of Hilda and Etheldreda, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History highlights women’s roles in the church (as patronesses, nuns, and religious leaders) as noteworthy. Queen Eanfled, for instance, acts as a patroness to Wilfrid, eventually launching him in his religious career, seeing that he makes the right connections so he can study in Rome (5.19). Later, Eanfled and her daughter Aelffled, who grows up as a nun, each become abbesses over the Whitby double monastery (4.26).7
Bede mentions at least 15 female religious leaders by name (mostly abbesses, with one prioress), devoting whole chapters to a few of these. In addition, Bede names and gives partial stories of several nuns, such as the nun Earcongota, whom Bede says “deserves especial mention” for her “wonderful deeds and miracles” (3.8).
Beth Allison Barr devotes part of a chapter to exploring the insufficient references to women in the most popular church history texts, such as the one that I’m most familiar with, Church History in Plain Language, which references only 8 women, none of them medieval (Barr 96-98).
Yet if Bede, who hardly traveled outside his medieval monastery, can see so many women as significant to the growth and life of the English-speaking church over a hundred-year period, surely, as Barr points out (98), over two thousand years of church history should yield itself to highlighting many more significant women in the church history textbooks of today?
NOTES
1 You can read a brief history of Ely Cathedral and its founder, Etheldreda, from their website.
My favorite of the medieval cathedrals in Britain is Salisbury Cathedral, but since they have stained glass windows dedicated to the poet George Herbert and a statue on the front of the cathedral representing him, I am probably biased.
2 C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books.” In God in the Dock, edited by Walter Hooper. Eerdmans, 1970. (Originally Lewis wrote the essay in 1944.)
3 Bede’s sizeable Ecclesiastical History of the English People was translated from Latin into Old English a couple of centuries later. (Old English is the purely-Germanic English of the Anglo-Saxon period.) Bede’s history covers the Romano-British period before the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain (which Bede syncretizes from a few sources he’s read) through the 7th century, during which Bede is born, up until he completes the Ecclesiastical History in 731. You can read the British Library’s brief overview of Bede here and easily find English translations of Bede’s History online, such as this one from Project Gutenberg.
4 Bede’s History is divided into five books, each with twenty to thirty chapters. In my parenthetical notation, the first number is the book and the second is the chapter (e.g., 4.26 = book 4, chapter 26). I quote from the Penguin edition.
5 Sometimes we’re told that a woman joins the convent after her husband has died, but often that is not clarified. Whether or not she is or has been a wife, Bede is more interested in highlighting the part a woman plays in the development of the English church. Beth Allison Barr develops throughout her book how leaving distinctive feminine roles behind was a path toward holiness and spiritual authority for medieval women.
6 Believe it or not, these issues are directly related. The controversy was over whether to follow the Roman tradition for the church calendar and monastic life or the Irish one.
Interestingly, Bede presents us with another example that doesn’t fit with modern biblical womanhood when Queen Eanfled and her husband King Oswy, differing on which tradition to follow, each, along with their attendants, celebrate Easter on a different date: “so that when the King had ended Lent and was keeping Easter, the Queen and her attendants were still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday” (3.25).
Although this disagreement does lead to some household confusion, Bede does not reprimand Eanfled (or Oswy) for this lack of marital unity (nor hint that Eanfled should yield to her husband’s spiritual leadership), but instead highlights the importance of toleration with religious customs among believers. Bede lifts up the example of Bishop Aidan, during whose “lifetime these differences of Easter observance were patiently tolerated by everyone; for . . . [Aidan] labored diligently to cultivate the faith, piety, and, love that marks out God’s saints.” Bishop Aidan “was therefore,” says Bede, “rightly loved by all, even by those who differed from his opinion on Easter, and was held in high respect” (3.25).
7 It seems that Queen Eanfled is not the only wife-turned-abbess (presumably after being widowed) whose daughter is also a nun. Another is Abbess Heriburg, whose daughter Coenburg is a nun in her convent at Watton (Bede 5.3).
