Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

Möðruvellir in Eyjafjörður. Photograph by Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir  If you drive south from the seaside town Akureyri in North Iceland, you will go along the Eyjafjörður valley, a wide valley flanked by the sea to the north and tall, majestic mountains on other sides. The landscape is relatively gentle in a country known for its […]

The second workshop in the Leverhulme-funded international networks research project, “Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon,” met at Boston University this summer from July 26th to 28th for three full and exciting days of papers, discussion and planning for future research. Entitled “Gender and Genre,” the workshop was attended by ten member of the […]

Titian, Tarquinius and Lucretia, c. 1571. Image from Wikimedia Commons, used to illustrate the general entry on rape. In Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women – a project of dubious sincerity, in which Chaucer’s narrator claims to be telling stories of ‘good women’ and the men who betray them – there are no fewer than two […]

  (Senate House Library, by stevecadman [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons) At the New Chaucer Society Congress in July 2016, I was fortunate to attend the Graduate Student Workshop on Manuscripts organised by Dr Aditi Nafde. The workshop consisted of a series of mini-lectures on the Sunday before the congress officially began and […]

Persecuted Jews, BritLibCottonNeroDiiFol183v, Wikipedia Commons Scholarship on European women’s letter writing is increasingly challenging the canonical notion of women’s exclusion from medieval literary production. As Clare Monagle and I argue in a forthcoming chapter, there was a lot more letter writing by medieval women than has typically been recognised. However, even if we look beyond […]

Altar of Dorothea von Montau at the cathedral in Kwidzyn, Poland. Image from Wikipedia Commons. I’m currently in the final throes of writing up a PhD thesis on vowesses: English women, usually widows, who took a vow of chastity without the accompanying monastic vows of poverty and obedience. These women were free to live where they chose and […]