Stealing Obedience explores how a Christian notion of agent action – where freedom incurs responsibility – was a component of identity in the last hundred years of Anglo-Saxon England, and investigates where agency (in the modern sense) might be sought in these narratives.

Plate

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction:  On Stealing Obedience

1: Dunstan in the Theatre of Choice

2: ‘Esto quod es’: Ælfric’s Colloquy and the Imperatives of Monastic Identity

3: Edith’s Choice

4: Leaving Wilton: Gunhild and the Phantoms of Agency

5: The Silence of Eve

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe is a professor in the Department of English and the director of the Medieval Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley.