Postcards from the Archives

Women's Literary Culture Before the Conquest

Forthcoming event. Speaking Internationally: Women’s Literary Culture and the Canon in the Global Middle Ages

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 […]


Anon Was a Woman? The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great in St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 567.

St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 567, p.75. CC BY-NC. by Diane Watt, University of Surrey   One of the challenges of writing a history of women’s literary culture is that of the anonymous text. Virginia Woolf famously speculated in A Room of One’s Own (1929) that ‘Anon…was often a woman’ (p.38) and in the succeeding decades feminist […]


Forthcoming event: FASS Festival of Research 2019

The third annual FASS Festival of Research is taking place on Thursday 24th January 2019, and is a full day event packed with exciting and topical panel discussions exploring the intersection between FASS research and current societal challenges. The festival will conclude with a keynote by Professor Diane Watt, winner of a Major Research Fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust […]


Can the Fragments Speak? Cotton Caligula A.XIV and Lambeth Palace MS 427.

London, Lambeth Palace, MS 427, fols.209v-210r. Reproduced with the kind permission of Lambeth Palace Library. Note the first line of fol.210r is copied in a pen trial on fol. 209v.  Fols. 210 and 211 were are one stage used as binding, but worm holes through the vellum indicate that the leaves have long been incorporated into […]