Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

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 […]

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 […]