Postcards from the Archives

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.

In the last two decades queer, gender and feminist studies have enabled scholars to better understand the multiplicity of temporal experiences and discourses of time as well as the entanglements between the temporal and the social in the pre-modern period. Far from being a disembodied concept, time is quintessentially associated with contingent social practices and […]

I will be presenting a paper entitled ‘Before Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe and its Antecedents’ at the Speaking Internationally conference at Bangor University on 27 June, in a session entitled Margery Kempe and the Wider World (sponsored by the Margery Kempe Society). Abstract The Book of Margery Kempe is often positioned at the beginning of the English tradition […]