We are fortunate to have a contemporary record of the king’s symptoms as recorded by Asser, King Alfred’s Welsh bishop and admirer. Introduction: King Alfred, ‘England’s Darling’ (849 – 900) suffered from a painful illness for much of his life, the nature of which has been the source of some speculation among Anglo-Saxonists. Above all, Asser’s investment in mining the symbolic potential of queens and royal women for constructing models of royal paternity and for legitimating sovereign power in the Alfredian court alerts us to the methodological importance of studying women and female figures, even during historical periods in which their social and political influence was sharply curtailed.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Volume 84 (1991) As the ‘Life’ unfolds, Asser emerges as an author with a keen sense of the symbolic currency of royal women, as well as of the importance of family and domestic life in shaping and reflecting individual character. Tracing the royal women in Asser’s ‘Life’ provides valuable insight into the personal and transpersonal elements of Anglo-Saxon kingship, while revealing this powerful, albeit paradoxically precarious, office as a triangulated structure buttressed on images of women mediated through textual fictions. Despite their differences, these female figures nevertheless serve Asser’s broader goal: namely, to construct Alfred as the ideal male sovereign, perfectly suited to rule on account of his composite personality, as well as his openness to both women’s influence and ecclesiastical guidance. The royal women that Asser features throughout the ‘Life’ differ in their particulars: Alfred’s stepmother, Judith, for example, emblematizes youth, Frankish fashion, and the prospective revitalization of the realm through ‘cosmopolitan kingship’, while his wife, Ealhswith, and mother-in-law, Eadburh, serve as caricatures of chaste womanhood. My argument is that Asser relied on textual representations of queens and royal women as tools to illustrate Alfred’s ‘kingly personality’ and to construct a model of royal paternity founded in piety and chaste living, one that was thus consonant with his own monastic world-view. I focus on Asser’s ‘Life of King Alfred’, a quasi-historical, quasi-hagiographical account of Alfred the Great (AD849–899) that is notable for being the first biography of an English king as well as a key text for establishing Alfred’s legitimate right to the West Saxon throne. My essay reconsiders this seemingly dark period in the history of Anglo-Saxon queenship in order to reveal royal women’s symbolic and rhetorical significance to political life, even when their practical power was severely limited.

It is a long-standing truism that from the mid-eighth to the mid-tenth century, West Saxon queens and royal women exercised relatively little power and agency.

Asser king alfred