Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

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 […]

Image from Wikipedia Commons Hildegard of Bingen (c1098-1179) could be described as a Renaissance Woman long before that term was coined (for men) or the Renaissance dawned. She was a poet, musician, theologian, composer, artist, doctor, botanist, philosopher, environmentalist, singer, herbalist, preacher, lexicographer and visionary – and it would be no idle claim to call […]

Fifteenth-century stained glass window showing St Anne teaching the Virgin Mary to read, from the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Beckley, Oxon.  Photo by Liv Robinson. ‘That woman… is a woman!’ (Shakespeare in Love) Students of the Middle Ages probably consider acting to be an activity which was undertaken by men […]