Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

Although my degrees have been in Philosophy, Aesthetics and (latterly) in Environmental Science, I have written poetry all my life. I have been fortunate in being published widely, and I give frequent readings all over Britain and abroad. Two of my collections were published by Oversteps Books, and I subsequently took over as Managing Editor […]

On 21st January, members of the network attended the Women and the Canon Conference, Christ Church, University of Oxford, and took part in a roundtable discussion about the project Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval English Canon. The Women and the Canon Conference was a two-day event, organized by a group of postgraduates and early […]

My fiction is the natural outgrowth of a fascination with medieval history and culture, my itch to explore what it might have been like to live in those times. To this end, I write my novels in the third person subjective point-of-view, which means that I present the narrative from within the minds of several […]

  In summer 2015, I was a participant in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on Manuscript Materiality. As seminar participants, we experienced first-hand the laborious and delicate work required of medieval scribes to produce the written word. While experimenting with techniques for making parchment, scraping quills, preparing ink, crafting paper, and assembling a […]

On 31 May 1310, a medieval author and a medieval book were sentenced to be burnt. The title of Bruce Holsinger’s 2014 novel might have been the judgment of a fourteenth-century inquisitor: not a political prophecy but a treatise that outraged the church, for William of Paris Le Mirouer des simples ames was indeed the […]

In chapter 60 of The Book of Margery Kempe (c.1436-8), Margery is in Norwich when she meets a lady who wishes to take her for dinner. ‘As honest wolde , sche went to the cherch ther the lady herd hir servyse, wher this creatur sey a fayr ymage of owr Lady clepyd a “pyte”’ (285) […]