Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

Diane Watt, University of Surrey and Liz Herbert McAvoy, Swansea University The afterlife is not typically associated with aggressive pets and insatiable worms. But these are exactly the creatures that appeared to an unnamed woman recluse living in Winchester, England, over the course of three nights in the summer of 1422. The woman was an […]

Diane Watt, University of Surrey Marie Maitland, a 16th-century Scottish gentlewoman, has for centuries been recognised as the likely scribe of the Maitland Quarto. This important manuscript, now held in the Pepys Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge, is an anthology of Scottish poetry by members of the noble Maitland family and their associates. Maitland’s name […]

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 […]