Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

The Crucifixion, Pietro Lorenzetti (1320-44), tempera and gold leaf on wood. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift and Gwynne Andrews Fund, 2002). Images and stories of bloodshed have been ubiquitous of late. Bloodied and wounded children in Syria are carried towards hospitals by wailing parents after being exploded by man-made weapons. Blood […]

‘Cistercian nuns’, London, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 11, fol. 6r, Source Wikimedia Commons With the approaching festive season, many people will concur with the following saying, attributed to Benjamin Franklin: ‘there cannot be good living where there is not good drinking’. The Manere of Good Lyvyng perhaps surprisingly does not completely disagree: ‘Drynke (…) my […]

ÍB 65 8vo. A common girl (born 1689) writes in her own hand that she owns this book of hymns. Picture Helgi Bragason, The National library of Iceland. Though published records have little to say about the bookish activities of secular women in Iceland in the high and late Middle Ages, the limited available evidence […]

The remains of the Franciscan monastery at Mount Zion, Jerusalem, which was the ‘headquarters’ of medieval European pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Photograph by Anthony Bale. During her difficult journey from her home in Norfolk to Jerusalem in the spring of 1414, the medieval mystic Margery Kempe was persistently bullied by her co-pilgrims. According to […]

The Merchant, pictured in the Ellesmere Manuscript (San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9, f. 102v, detail). Image from Wikimedia Commons. Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale has a reputation for crude and explicit sexual content. An elderly bachelor, January, seeks out a much younger bride, May, in the fond belief that her youth will […]

Image from Wikimedia Commons How does a legend arise, and what purpose does it serve? Is myth the opposite of history, or can it elucidate the rather sparse hard facts that we inherit? And if the story of a noblewoman performing a highly unlikely action persists down through nearly a thousand years, what does that […]