The Heroic Age  Issue 7  Spring 2004  Continental Business
Anglo-Saxon Women's Letters  by Michel Aaij, Ph.D. University of
Tennessee   Discussed in this review: Janine Cünnen (2000),
Fiktionale Nonnenwelten: Angelsächsische Frauenbriefe des 8. und
9. Jahrhunderts [Fictional Nuns' Worlds: Anglo-Saxon Women's
Letters of the 8th and 9th Century]. Heidelberg: Carl Winter
Universitätsverlag. ISBN 3825310698. 364+xi pages, 1
illustration.  This is an ambitious work, with a two-fold
thesis, each of whose parts might fill a book. First, Cünnen
attempts to show that the Anglo-Saxon letters preserved for
posterity indicate, in opposition to H.R. Jauß's claim, that
there did exist a concept of fictionality before Chrétien de
Troyes, a fictionality to be teased out of correspondence,
especially by and to women, by studying its rhetorical schemes.
Related is the author's intention to elevate the status of these
letters to that of literature, by adding fictionality to their
rhetoricity. Second, the author aims to conne