8 The New York ReviewLife of Gundrada de Warenne,” Karen
Dempsey picks up the traces of a
Flemish- born noblewoman who moved
to East Anglia. Gundrada was long
thought to have been an illegitimate
daughter of William the Conqueror
and Queen Matilda; though we are told
that historians no longer believe this,
Matilda gave Gundrada a manor house
in Cambridgeshire, evidence of some
sort of close tie— “perhaps that of a lady-
in- waiting, a role that can sometimes
be akin to that of a surrogate daugh-
ter.” (Old Queen Matilda, incidentally,
makes an unforgettable appearance in
Lauren Groff’s recent novel Matrix,^3
where Groff imagines a painful en-
counter between her heroine, the writer
Marie de France, and the queen who, in
this fierce poetic re- visioning of history,
is her step- grandmother, a shrunken,
malignant, capricious matriarch, closer
to the wicked fairy Carabosse than a
fairy queen.)
Gundrada’s life is known only in
fragments, but at the age of seventeen
she married William de Warenne, also
Flemish, who had fought in the Battle
of Hastings and was richly rewarded
by the new Norman king with lands in
his English dominion. Gundrada’s trail
is picked up at Castle Acre near Kings
Lynn, “one of the largest earthwork cas-
tles in England,” some of it still visible.
Around 1077 Gundrada founded the
first Cluniac priory in the country, at
Lewes in Sussex, on the site of a shrine
to Saint Pancras, an obscure Roman
convert who was martyred at the age of
fourteen and has now become, since the
Eurostar crossed the Channel, the de
facto genius loci of London. Gundrada
signed its charter with an X— literacy
for laywomen was still rare.
Dempsey speculates that the gift
to the monks may have been “a form
of penance by Gundrada on behalf of
her brother” Gerbod, who “acciden-
tally killed his liege lord... in battle,”
subsequently fled to Rome, and then
took sanctuary in Cluny— the priory
at Lewes might have been founded to
secure his reprieve. Dempsey keeps
patiently sifting through the scraps of
evidence, relying on wistful- sounding
hypotheses. “It is possible that Gun-
drada aspired to capture aspects of
Matilda’s domestic arrangements for
herself at Castle Acre,” she writes. She
notes that a church in Norfolk is built
of stone from Caen in Normandy and
speculates that Gundrada might have
chosen this building material to pro-
claim a link with Norman territory
across the Channel.
Dempsey’s excitement also simmers
on the page as she examines the clutch of
two dozen “castellated” bone pins found
in the excavations at Castle Acre, imag-
ining the connective power of these small
ornaments. Possibly “sewn together with
gold thread through the hair,” they may
have proclaimed their wearer’s status as
a chatelaine. If exchanged as gifts, these
“castles in her hair” could be considered
as “intermediaries”:The pins may speak to ongoing
connections between elite families
both pre- and post- Conquest; they
might even suggest a network of
shared material culture of women
that sought to bridge the divisionsthat must have been present in
eleventh- century society.The hairpins (if they were hairpins—
they could be pegs, for example, in a
game like cribbage) may or may not
have been worn by Gundrada. But as
many of the subjects of the collection
play a similar part— as go- betweens,
peacemakers, etc.—the idea of “in-
termediaries” recurs; it mirrors the
role the Virgin Mary fills in medieval
doctrine and devotion, as the Queen of
Heaven in the celestial court standing by
the side of her son, a vertex where many
edges converge, pleading for mercy, as
in the closing words of the ancient
prayer, the Hail Mary: “Pray for us sin-
ners now and at the hour of our death.”
Eschatological relations of power in
heaven above reproduce arrangements
on earth down below among the priv-
ileged and well born: the exaltation of
Mary at Chartres redounded to the
glory of French queens— Blanche of
Castile and her grandmother Eleanor
of Aquitaine. The scholars’ efforts to
bring women into view in the Middle
Ages reveal that they did hold positions
of power and wield means of influence
from Anglo- Saxon to Tudor times, but
when trust in the intercession of the
saints was denounced by Luther and
the Protestant reformers in England,
it followed that the intercessionary
powers of women also became sus-
pect. Henry VIII’s split from Rome in
1534 and his assault on church power
(including abolishing the law of sanc-
tuary) severed women’s networks and
cast a shadow on the legitimacy of fe-
male influence.
The turn against the cult of the Vir-
gin and the destruction of shrines of
beloved medieval saints like Margaret
of Antioch (patroness of childbirth)
and Catherine of Alexandria (of young
girls, students, and philosophers), of
abbeys like Barking and Wilton and
fabulously rich and popular shrines
like Walsingham, gave impetus to a
heavy undertow of misogyny in later
culture in Britain. It can be felt in
Shakespeare’s King Lear, for exam-
ple, and in his early poem Venus and
Adonis, where the poet is torn between
the spiritual compass bearings of his
youth and the new landscape of Prot-
estantism. (Ted Hughes explores this
erasure of female power in his monu-
mental, erratic study Shakespeare and
the Goddess of Supreme Being.)
But Relations of Power keeps closely
focused on its chosen topics, watch-
ing for the twitch of an abbess’s habit
or the trace of a signature, to reveal
that someone who is female is there,
up to something. The editors do not
attempt a panoptic perspective; their
essays yearn to make women in the
past seen and heard, but their methods
are stern and their revelations scanty
and often wishful. Writers and poets
are nourished by the close- up histori-
cal scholarship on display in Relations
of Power— as the work of Toni Morri-
son, Hilary Mantel, and Lauren Groff
shows— but this collection made me
recognize more than ever the riches
made possible by the fictive imagina-
tion’s freedom, and remember the en-
fleshed intensity of those ripe, richly
tapestried and stirring psychological
dramas of the Middle Ages by novelists
such as Anya Seton, Geoffrey Trease,
and Rosemary Sutcliff, which like
many girls of my age at the time, I read
under the bedclothes. Q(^3) Reviewed in these pages by Irina
Dumitrescu, one of the editors of Rela-
tions of Power, December 16, 2021.
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