Abstract
ABSTRACTThe letters by Anglo-Saxon women in the Boniface correspondence are connected by cultural practices and emotions centered on the conversion mission that functioned to maintain connections between the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. A striking recurring focus of these letters is on loss and isolation, which connects them to the Old English elegies. Many of the letters describe the writers’ traumatic experiences that result from the death or absence of kin. These are women who endured the trauma of being left behind when others migrated overseas or who, in traveling away from their homeland, found themselves isolated in an alien environment, displaced in time as well as space. This article offers an analysis of the letters, focusing on the queer temporalities they explore, the queer emotions they evoke, and the queer kinships that they forge. It argues that the women’s letters represent fragments of an early queer archive of migratory feelings.
Highlights
The letters of early Anglo-Saxon women found in the collection that has come to be known as the Boniface correspondence represent the earliest surviving writing unquestionably attributable to named Anglo-Saxon women
Drawing on Ann Cvetkovich’s work on the cultural politics of queer feeling (Cvetkovich, 2003), I suggest that her work on films and narratives that explore modern transnational and diasporic trauma, including colonization and slavery, has something to offer the reader of early medieval texts about migration and isolation
I want to look at her first letter, which I quote here at slightly greater length and in Dronke’s own formatting in order to reveal his surprising decision in translating this passage into modern English, to transform it into poetry
Summary
To cite this article: Diane Watt (2017) A Fragmentary Archive: Migratory Feelings in Early Anglo-Saxon Women’s Letters, Journal of Homosexuality, 64:3, 415-429, DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2016.1190217 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2016.1190217 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wjhm20 JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY 2017, VOL. 64, NO. 3, 415–429 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2016.1190217 School of English and Languages, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK
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