Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

   [Fol 12v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius E I. My photograph.] Genealogy was fundamental to the medieval imagination, and at the heart of medieval historical writing. Chronicles, as well as romances and hagiography, are based on structures of legacy and succession, and on the genealogical concept that stories from the past justify or contest the […]

  fig. 1 Add. MS 61823, f. 43v. Reproduced with the permission of the British Library. The Book of Margery Kempe records the history of critical attitudes to female piety and devotional practice as much as the life and revelations of a fifteenth-century vowess. Since the rediscovery of the “Salthouse” text in 1934 (London, British […]

   In my last blog in May, I wrote about literature celebrating Virgin Martyrs in the first part of my medieval novel, The Errant Hours.  In this post, I will focus on the Arthurian legend – The Knight with the Lion/The Lady of the Well, which informed the second part. The location of the novel […]

An illuminated initial from the Wilton Psalter, showing a group of nuns reading (my photograph) For a woman to read as a woman is not to repeat an identity or an experience that is given but to play a role she constructs with reference to her identity as a woman, which is also a construct, […]

Chapel of Sant Llàtzer. Photo: Enfo. (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License) There is a famous scene in The Book of Margery Kempe in which Margery meets with a woman described in the text as a “Senyt Brydis mayden” [St. Birgitta’s maidservant]. Devotion to and imitation of Birgitta of Sweden is one of the key features […]

Image from The Taymouth Hours, BL Yates Thompson 13, f.68v I am quite convinced that if you scratched most writers of medieval fiction, under the surface you would find a childhood spent reading stories about the middle ages: Robin Hood, Arthurian Myths, Fairy Tales. Perhaps you would also find a longstanding love of medieval imagery […]