Abstract 

This transfeminist thesis examines a powerful community of early models of female masculine identity witnessed by four early medieval texts written by or about gender queer and queer women. Each, I argue, reflects their nonnormative authorial subjectivities, environments and autonomy, but especially the cultural conditions of masculinist subjugation faced by women which thus, they also retain. This queer transfeminist thesis argues that authorial thinking processes visible in the Caligula Life of St Mildrith, the characterisation of Grendel’s mother in Beowulf, Hugeburc’s Hodoeporican of St Willibald, and the Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt stand as witnesses to the ways in which, historically, we have come to understand womanhood and the environment. Following close analyses in dialogue with these early models of female identity and multiple contemporary schools of feminist thought, ecocriticism, Critical Race Theory, trans and queer theory, this thesis, as an articulation of radical ecofeminism, illustrates how these texts constitute gender nonconforming and queer literary culture, and significantly, by their contribution to knowledge, they establish early histories of female masculinities. 

Chapter I explores the literary lineage and landscape of the founding monastic women of Minster-in-Thanet alongside contemporary contexts of female masculinities to show some of its powerful historical predecessors. Chapter II examines the evolving Christian world refashioned by influential heroic poetry violently recast on mythic terrain embodied by a woman destroyed in its wake. Chapter III reveals how Hugeburc’s authorship undermines male masculine authority in a collaborative pilgrimage narrative which I argue contains new cultural modes of trans feminist mobilities that I term trans-authorial subjectivities and trans-authorial mobility. Lastly, Chapter IV culminates with a radical new queer and trans feminist reading of Mary of Egypt which attests her resistance to the cultural conversion practices enforced in the Life upon the basis of masculinities as male bodied identity.