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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A.S. Byatt’s Booker prize winning novel Possession (1990) opens with the dramatic discovery of drafts of two previously unknown letters in the pages of a long ‘undisturbed’ book in the London Library. The letters are in the hand of a (fictitious) famous Victorian poet. The person who finds the letters is a research assistant to […]
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Gdańsk, Archiwum Państwowe, APG 300, 27/3, fol. 12r. Akta miasta Gdańska – Missiva, 12 June 1431. Margery Kempe’s arrival in the modern world was surprisingly quiet. In 1910, Edmund Gardner published a brief account of the East Anglian mystic as printed in 1521 by Henry Pepwall – itself a reprint of a 1501 pamphlet by […]
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Why do we need to rethink the medieval literary canon? Most people who share an interest in English Literature have heard of Geoffrey Chaucer, and some will have studied his famous poem, The Canterbury Tales, at school or university. Quite a number of his famous pilgrims, women as well as men, are well known to […]
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