Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

by Namrata Chaturvedi Transcription from an 18th century manuscript of Sahajobai’s verse. Accessed from Rajasthani Shodh Sansthan, Jodhpur. Reproduced with permission. Dear sister, come let us celebrate with songs of rejoice, The eternal one has descended in human form of his choice.                                                        –Sahajobai, 18th c. north India Sahajobai thus sings of her guru’s (master’s) birth. Known […]

By Liz Herbert McAvoy Corbel depicting the head of a woman outside St Mark’s Chapel, Bristol (c) Liz Herbert McAvoy The protracted meeting in Norwich between the aspiring urban vowess, Margery Kempe, and the anchoress, Julian of Norwich, in the latter’s cell at St Julian’s church, has been much discussed, not least in other contributions […]

by Victoria MacKenzie Image: Hardback cover of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain My debut novel, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain, explores the lives of two medieval women, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. It was published in 2023 by Bloomsbury and won the First Book […]

by Santha Bhattacharji The Book of Margery Kempe, Chapter 18, British Library, Add. MS 61823. Credit: The British Library. This post[i] explores a possible ‘starting point’ for the writing of The Book of Margery Kempe (written c. 1438)[ii], sometimes described as the first autobiography in English. The Book records Margery Kempe’s mystical experiences, embedded in […]

The British Library last year completed a project digitising and cataloguing manuscripts connected with Medieval and Renaissance Women. The full list has been published and you can download the full list here. Unfortunately due to the cyber attack on the British Library late last year, the links to the digitized manuscripts do not currently work. […]

Women and Medieval Literary Culture From the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century Women and Medieval Literary Culture from the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century is a new volume published by Cambridge University Press in August 2023 and the latest output of the Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon network. It unpacks the […]