Emotional Othering in the Old English corpus: Constructing the unemotional woman in early medieval England

This study applies the concept of emotional othering to the Old English corpus to examine how women’s anger was constructed in early medieval England. Drawing on lexicographic information and early research on anger vocabulary in Old English, the analysis explores the rare instances in which female anger appears, focusing on how it is portrayed as either absent, restrained, or irrationally excessive. While earlier research offers broad semantic mappings of anger, few studies have foregrounded gender. Building on earlier research that proves that female anger was familiar but rarely moralized, this study argues that its representation at two extremes—erasure or uncontrollable rage—acts as a device to “other” women, rendering their anger illegitimate and limiting its expression within narrow social boundaries. Simultaneously, women were often cast as emotional regulators, managing others’ emotions rather than expressing their own. This dual dynamic—restricting women’s anger while assigning them responsibility for managing others’—alongside the overall scarcity of female anger in the corpus, further reinforces their construal as emotional others in this society.