Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

Pens, ink, and the hands that hold the book: The Chastising of God’s Children In Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125, one of the twelve manuscripts in which the devotional compilation The Chastising of God’s Children survives, the prologue is addressed to a ‘dere frend’ (f. 1r) rather than to a ‘religious sister’. In the […]

Although my degrees have been in Philosophy, Aesthetics and (latterly) in Environmental Science, I have written poetry all my life. I have been fortunate in being published widely, and I give frequent readings all over Britain and abroad. Two of my collections were published by Oversteps Books, and I subsequently took over as Managing Editor […]

On 21st January, members of the network attended the Women and the Canon Conference, Christ Church, University of Oxford, and took part in a roundtable discussion about the project Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval English Canon. The Women and the Canon Conference was a two-day event, organized by a group of postgraduates and early […]

My fiction is the natural outgrowth of a fascination with medieval history and culture, my itch to explore what it might have been like to live in those times. To this end, I write my novels in the third person subjective point-of-view, which means that I present the narrative from within the minds of several […]

  In summer 2015, I was a participant in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on Manuscript Materiality. As seminar participants, we experienced first-hand the laborious and delicate work required of medieval scribes to produce the written word. While experimenting with techniques for making parchment, scraping quills, preparing ink, crafting paper, and assembling a […]

On 31 May 1310, a medieval author and a medieval book were sentenced to be burnt. The title of Bruce Holsinger’s 2014 novel might have been the judgment of a fourteenth-century inquisitor: not a political prophecy but a treatise that outraged the church, for William of Paris Le Mirouer des simples ames was indeed the […]