6 The New York Reviewpast. In the opening essay, “Female
Networks and Exiled Bishops Between
Late Antiquity and the Early Mid-
dle Ages,” Julia Hillner and Máirín
MacCarron analyze two “high- profile
cases”: their first subject is Liberius, a
fourth- century bishop of Rome, their
second Wilfrid of York, who died in
the early eighth century. In Liberius’s
day, a controversy over the nature of
Jesus was raging, with Arians reject-
ing that he was fully divine as well as
fully human. That belief had been con-
demned as heresy, and when the em-
peror Constantius II issued a decree
with Arian tendencies, Liberius refused
to sign it. As a result he was exiled to
Thrace in 355; another bishop, Felix,
was ordained in his place in Rome.
After Liberius forswore his earlier
stance and accepted Arianism, he
managed to return to Rome, where he
reclaimed his throne, effectively plung-
ing the church into schism. In his own
writings, no “female contacts” appear,
we are told, but later reports in other
sources, including the sixth- century
Liber Pontificalis and the Passio
Felicis (of uncertain date), increasingly
testify to women making history, be-
traying the true faith by promoting and
protecting Arian heretics, including
Liberius. These schemers include Con-
stantius’s wife, the empress Eusebia,
and Constantia, supposedly the emper-
or’s sister. None of this female network
around Liberius bears much close his-
torical scrutiny, but it clearly betrays
how the power of female patronage was
widely understood and feared during
the period when some of the chroni-
clers were writing and when Theodora,
empress of Byzantium (to name only
one female potentate), held sway.
The second bishop in question, Wil-
frid of York, was similarly exiled and
then wandered around the Christian
and pagan worlds, before being recon-
ciled to both the English church and
the Anglo- Saxon court; in his case, as
in Liberius’s, “elite women” pulling
strings featured strongly. Each of the
men’s stories also happens to be told
by two chroniclers— Liberius’s after a
longish interval of time, Wilfrid’s by
near contemporaries— who present
different accounts, thus giving inter-
preters rich opportunities for discus-
sion. Hillner and MacCarron claim
they are uncovering networked rela-
tions in order “to investigate and reveal
forms of storytelling in specific texts”;
they tap below the surface to find the
hidden account buried there, of which
medieval chroniclers may not have
been consciously aware.
In Wilfrid’s case, the Venerable Bede
in his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis An-
glorum (circa 731) tells one version of
his story; Eddius Stephanus, known
as Stephen, tells another in his Vita of
Wilfrid, written soon after the latter’s
death. Bede is generally perceived as
downplaying women’s prominence by
comparison with Stephen— in quan-
titative terms, the bias is solemnly
calculated as 12.12 percent women
in Bede (that is, out of 594 characters
mentioned in his chronicle, 72 are fe-
male) by contrast with 14.97 percent in
Stephen (25 women out of a full cast of
167). The latter also describes queens
flexing their royal muscles to gang up
against Wilfrid— a story Bede ignores.
But computer algorithms, analyzing
Bede, diagnose how his text reveals the
nodal importance of queens Hild (or
Hilda), Etheldreda, and Osthryth, aswell as the founder abbess Ethelburga
(or Ethelburh, or Ethelburg) of Barking.
Plotting the network of their rela-
tions reveals that these women enjoyed
“betweenness centrality,” network jar-
gon for connectivity between subjects
who appear in multiple instances of
intervention, mediation, and peacemak-
ing. Etheldreda, who ranked thirty- first
when considered on her own according
to number of mentions, jumps up to
fourteenth place when her position in
the network of relations around Wilfrid
is represented in a graph. The writers
claim that this reveals her influence at
a deeper level than Stephen’s dramatic
storytelling and greater proportion of
female characters. It turns out that Bede
does record the crucial part womenplayed: computers of the third millen-
nium have outed him as a quasi- feminist.
This densely argued essay inspires ad-
miration for its tenacity and detail, but
even as it charts power dynamics, it stays
with accepted loci of female influence:
the abbey, the palace, or, in other words,
dynastic marriage, the strategic social
alliance. With all the will in the world,
it proves tough using network theory
to shift the existing sense that relations
of power occupied conventional aristo-
cratic spaces. The approach also encour-
ages affectless dryness, which primary
sources such as first- person narratives
or poems or testimony wonderfully
dissolve: I missed hearing the voices
of women, the vivid personal accents of
tearful Margery Kempe who “started
out of her bed and said: ‘Alas, that ever
I did sin! It is full merry in Heaven,’” or
Joan of Arc during her trial, holding up
under relentless questioning and telling
her judges that Saint Michael spoke bet-
ter French than they, or Julian of Nor-
wich with her stoic challenge to despair,
“All shall be well, and all shall be well,
and all manner of thing shall be well.”Among the few female- associated
written records called on as evidence in
Relations of Power is a diploma dated
June 13, 1071, granting land and prop-
erty to the see of Túy in Galicia, Spain;
it is sealed with the personal device of
Urraca Fernández, daughter of King
Fernando and Queen Sancha of León-
Castilla. Urraca was a consecrated vir-
gin, as was the custom for a princess of
that royal house, Lucy K. Pick informs
us in her essay “Networking Powerand Gender at Court: An Eleventh-
Century Diploma and ‘Las Meninas.’”
One consequence of renouncing mar-
riage was that an heiress retained con-
trol of her property and, indeed, could
accrue more. Pick also homes in on
Urraca’s elder sister, Elvira, and tak-
ing her as the vertex of a dense cluster,
plots the convergence of multiple edges
representing her contacts and the alli-
ances formed around her along matri-
lineal lines, with Elvira at the center
like a dark star. (However, Pick render-
ing the title domina as “lord” seems to
me overdetermined, as it ignores the
feminine ending.)
Pick then takes a long leap to discuss
Las Meninas, Velázquez’s celebrated
mise en abyme, and refreshes this court
portrait convincingly when she focuses
on how the Infanta Margarita, bathed in
light, stands at the center of the composi-
tion. Pick quotes numerous condescend-
ing comments about the “little girl” and
“the adorable little infanta” from art his-
torians who have missed, she argues, the
social significance of this female child in
the nexus of power around Philip II:This is not merely a courtly group;
it is a female- dominated group all
of whose members, apart from
Velázquez himself, belong to the
households of the queen and the
infanta. This is not, however, to
say that it is a private, purely do-
mestic group. It is the “other half,”
so often- overlooked by scholars,
that enabled male- headed dynastic
monarchy to continue.Although Pick’s contribution is vigor-
ous and insightful, does this perception
amount to more than saying “cherchez
la femme”? Yet this is a view that used
to be scorned as misogynist in itself
and, oddly, still surfaces in contempo-
rary politics. (The widespread dislike
of Carrie Johnson, Boris Johnson’s new
wife, reverberates with these ancient
suspicions, well- founded though criti-
cism of her may otherwise be.)In the period covered by Relations of
Power, the church proves to be hospi-
table to women ambitious to manage
their own estates, but at the cost of sur-
rendering the right to movement, sex,
marriage, and children. Stephanie Hol-
lis, in another tightly interwoven chap-
ter, turns to dream visions as powerful
instruments of policy. She explores the
pun in the book’s title and argues that
relating stories matters in the acquisi-
tion of authority. She invokes the ha-
giographer Goscelin, who describes in
his Recital of a Vision (circa 1094) how
Alfgifu, abbess of Barking, confirmed
her sacred authority through a dream in
which the founder of the abbey, Ethel-
burga, appeared to her and leaned her
head on Alfgifu’s breast like a child with
her mother. The maternal metaphor res-
onates with widespread Marian imagery
in medieval piety. (In the twelfth cen-
tury Saint Bernard in a vision sees the
Virgin offer him her breast milk.)
Alfgifu’s experience is an intense
subjective epiphany, Hollis agrees, but
her approach remains resolutely func-
tionalist: by means of the heavenly
sanction of her dream visions, Alfgifu
was asserting her own status as heir to
a proud lineage. They allowed her to
argue for the sainthood of Ethelburga
and two of her other predecessors as
abbess, Hildelith (who died circa 716)and Wulfhild (who died after 996). The
abbesses were duly canonized and their
remains brought to Barking (“trans-
lated,” in the ecclesiastical terminology),
increasing the aura and not incidentally
the wealth of the abbey as a sanctuary
and a site of pilgrimage. A similar dream
origin occurs in the foundation of Wals-
ingham, where in 1061, according to
legend, Richeldis de Faverches, a noble-
woman, was commanded in a vision
of the Virgin Mary to build her a shrine
in the form of the house in Nazareth
where the holy family had lived.
Barking had been founded for Ethel-
burga by her brother, and she presided
over its magnificent estate in her own
right. Legend has it that she had been
briefly married to Edwin of Northum-
bria, and he had converted to Chris-
tianity at their union, but this may be
muddling her with another Ethelburga.
The parentage of Saint Edith of Wilton
(who died in 984), another royal nun,
follows similar lines, as her father, King
Edgar the Peaceful, had abducted her
mother, Wulfthryth, from the abbey
at Wilton, in spite of her wish to take
vows, and thereafter did penance for
his sin; Wulfthryth went back into the
cloister and became abbess, taking
their daughter, Edith, to live at Wilton
with her. Mother and daughter loved
fine clothes and their community was
dressed in gold and white robes, in the
same high style as the nuns and the choir
of Hildegard of Bingen in her abbey at
Rupertsberg.
Hollis is less focused on these colorful
aspects of her protagonists’ personalities
than on their autonomy and determined
resistance to the ecclesiastic and state
hierarchy when it threatened the nuns’
independence and coveted their reve-
nues. In the long term the nuns’ resolve
was in vain: these great abbeys were
stripped and razed in the Dissolution
of the Monasteries in 1536–1541; only
a curfew tower remains of Barking, the
ruins of St. Mary’s Church at Wilton, and
a single soaring gothic arch of the medi-
eval priory at Walsingham, once the
wealthiest pilgrimage site in England.
The consolidation of male power un-
derlies the rise of the centralized royal
state, especially when, as Henry VIII
decided, ecclesiastic power was in-
vested in the monarch as head of the
church and defender of the faith. In-
terestingly, Moretti suggests that at the
close of both Macbeth and Hamlet we
can see, with Duncan and Fortinbras
embodying strong, legitimate kingship,
the coming of “something like the na-
scent European state system.” Shake-
speare, living in the aftermath of the
Dissolution, was familiar with “bare
ruin’d choirs,” and dramatized in play
after play the character of royal power,
its reach and its limits. It is not irrelevant
that Claudius gains the throne of Den-
mark by marrying the widowed queen,
cutting Hamlet, her son the prince, and,
in a patrilineal structure, the heir, out of
the succession. This trace of matriarchy
wasn’t simply a residue of an older social
order but a zone of contest where some
individuals, like the great abbesses,
fought to stay in charge— and live as
they wished.A strong thread through these essays
consists of non scribal evidence— an ex-
change of rings, the stamp of a seal, the
composition of a funerary monument,
a clutch of ornamental pins. In her es-
say “Herstory: Exploring the MaterialIllustration from a French manuscript
probably commissioned for the Cistercian
nunnery of Notre-Dame-la-Royale at
Maubuisson, founded by Blanche of
Castile, late thirteenth centuryBritish LibraryWarner 04 09 _ALT.indd 6 5 / 26 / 22 4 : 14 PM