Whilst browsing through the shelves of a small second-hand bookshop in Aberystwyth in1994, I came across a Penguin translation of The Book of Margery Kempe, an apparently autobiographical text written by a fifteenth-century wife and mother living in Bishops (now Kings) Lynn in Norfolk in 1436. Deeming it ideal for the evening course on women’s […]
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harold_dead_bayeux_tapestry.png In an article in Hybrid Pedagogy, Sean Michael Morris, Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel discuss play as critical enquiry in the classroom and lament the ways in which academic rigour is often opposed to ‘collective, playful learning’. In their words: ‘Play, experimentation, and collaboration can all lead to important discoveries and deep intellectual inquiry. […]
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf#/media/File:Virginia_Woolf_1927.jpg Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is probably best known to us now as part of the history of feminism. Most famously, she wrote that women need to be able to “think back through our mothers,” arguing that to develop a tradition of women’s writing, we need a history of women’s writing that women can […]
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Monday 20 July 14:00 Welcome & Introductory Comments: Diane Watt 4:30 Presentation & Workshop: Clare Lees & Kathryn Maude (King’s College, London) ‘A Woman Without A Country’: Women’s Literary Culture and the Earliest Medieval English Texts 16:30 Informal Discussion Tuesday 21 July 9:30 Liz Herbert McAvoy (Swansea University) ‘O der lady, be my help.’ Women’s […]
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chaldron_st_peter_%26_st_paul_112_crop_2.jpg One area within medieval studies in which there is widespread scholarly recognition of the interaction of the religious and literary cultures of women and men is the field of anchoritic studies. Anchoritism was the practice of seeking a closer relationship with God by withdrawing from worldly affairs, receiving the last rites and submitting to […]
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http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ellesmere_Chaucer#/media/File:Chaucer_ellesmere.jpg My first experience of reading medieval literature, unsurprisingly, came in the form of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales composed in the fourteenth-century. In 2009, as part of my A-Level course in English Literature I studied The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and immediately became interested in Middle English literature and medieval history. However, it would be […]
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