Postcards from the Archives

In 2023 I was invited to collaborate on a four-volume history of women’s writing in the British Isles from the medieval period to the present based on data from The Orlando Project. I have joined a team of nine other scholars: Kanika Batra, Katherine Binhammer, Karen Bourrier, Susan Brown, Isobel Grundy, Miranda Hickman, Kathryn Holland, […]

In 2020 an article was published to which I contributed, written by Catherine A.M Clarke with Adam Miyashiro, Megan Cavell, Daniel Thomas, and Stewart Brookes. Entitled ‘Twenty-five Years of “Anglo-Saxon Studies”: Looking Back, Looking Forward’, it appeared in the volume Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures edited by Catherine E. Karkov, Anna Kłosowska, and Vincent […]

Tuesday 9 March 2021, 5.30pm Speaker(s): Professor Diane Watt, University of Surrey Medieval Literatures Research Seminar The Book of Margery Kempe is often one of the earliest texts by a woman encountered by modern day students of English literature. The relationships between The Book of Margery Kempe and her literary antecedents are still relatively unknown or […]

Women’s literary history in England is usually taken to start in the later Middle Ages. Many students are taught that the first women writers were the visionaries, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe who lived in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. More recently attention has also been paid to earlier Francophone ‘English’ writers such as […]

Finding a name for my forthcoming book was not easy. Many books about English literature, history, religion and culture in the period between 450 and 1066 have the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ prominently in the title. But the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is fraught for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is a term that has been […]

  Megan Cavell’s interview with Diane Watt about her project, ‘Women’s Literary Culture Before the Conquest’, is published in The Public Medievalist. Click the link to read the interview.