SOURCE: Horner, Shari. “En/closed Subjects: The Wife's Lament and the Culture of Early Medieval Female Monasticism.” In Old English Literature: Critical Essays, edited by R. M. Liuzza, pp. 381-91. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.

In the following essay, originally published in 1994, Horner analyzes the elegy “The Wife's Lament” for indications of what life was like in the female monastic community.

It has long been accepted critical practice in Old English scholarship¹ to acknowledge that the Old English elegies employ the language of the Germanic-heroic world, of retainers and lords, to articulate a Christian world-view.² Those elegies which are generally believed to have male speakers—in particular “The Seafarer” and “The Wanderer”—are often read as poems which explore the various tensions between spiritual and worldly desires, and which apply traditional Germanic-heroic hierarchies to the relationship between God and man. Similarly, the speaker of “The Wife's Lament...