Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

by Liz Herbert McAvoy Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91 (the ‘Thornton Manuscript’), fol. 251v. (c) Liz Herbert McAvoy On Saturday, August 10th, 1422, the feast of St Lawrence, an unnamed anchoress enclosed somewhere in the city of Winchester received a vision while asleep in her small cell. This vision, which recurred for three consecutive […]

by June Davey The Boke of St Albans (Westminster, 1496), British Library, C.11.b.5, on display at the Medieval Women: In Their Own Words Exhibition (c) British Library. History is riddled with enigmas and one is the intriguing character of Dame Juliana (de) Berners, to whom the authorship of at least part The Book of Hawking, […]

by Diane Watt Margaret Paston writing to her husband from Gresham requesting weapons and armour (London, British Library, Add MS 34888, f.29) on display at the British Library’s Medieval Women: In Their Own Words Exhibition (c) British Library Margaret Paston, a fifteenth century Norfolk gentlewoman, was responsible for the largest collection of personal letters from […]

by Amy Morgan and Diane Watt We are delighted to announce that we have been awarded UKRI Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) Arts & Humanities IAA funding for a new project, Mapping Medieval Women Writers. Only a handful of medieval women writers are reasonably well-known today—primarily Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, both from Norfolk, […]

Women and Medieval Literary Culture: From the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century, co-edited by Diane Watt and Corinne Saunders, has won a prestigious 2024 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Titles. This volume arose out of the Leverhulme funded International Network, Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon. The volume was described by CHOICE in […]

Diane Watt, University of Surrey The British Library’s breathtaking new exhibition, Medieval Women: In Their Own Words, brings to life the experiences, stories and voices of women from the distant past. The show covers the period from 1100 to 1500, and a range of mainly western countries and cultures. Many of the women featured are […]