Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

We are pleased to announce that The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages will be published in print format in 2026. Brought together under the stewardship of Editors-in-Chief, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt, with the assistance of a committed international team of section editors and contributors, […]

by Amy Louise Morgan, Diane Watt and Sarah Wingrove This map identifies locations across England linked to the lives of medieval women writers and to medieval women who played a key role in literary history. Created by academics and researchers at the University of Surrey, and funded by an Arts & Humanities IAA award, the […]

Laura Kalas The Book of Margery Kempe, British Library Add. MS 61823, on display at the British Library’s Medieval Women: In Their Own Words Exhibition (c) British Library Margery Kempe was born into a wealthy merchant family in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, then known as Bishop’s Lynn, in 1373. After a series of religious visions she was […]

By Amy Louise Morgan Marie de France, Fables and Lais. Possibly Oxford (England), 1250s-1270s. The British Library Harley MS 978, on display at the British Library’s Medieval Women: In Their Own Words Exhibition (c) British Library Marie de France is one of the most well-known yet mysterious women writers of the medieval period. Often noted […]

by Karen Rushton The Ordinale and Customary of the Benedictine Nuns of Barking Abbey. University College, Oxford, Ms. 169, pp 118-19. With the kind permission of The Master and Fellows of University College Oxford. Katherine Sutton, Abbess of Barking between 1358 and 1377, has now been recognised as the earliest named English woman playwright. She […]

by Peter Mackie Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (Caedmon’s Hymn) in Oxford, Magdalen College, MS.Lat.105. Credit: The President and Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford. Reproduced with permission. Hild of Whitby, often known by the latinised version of her name, Hilda, was the founding Abbess of Streanaeshalch, now known as Whitby, high on the North Sea cliffs above […]