Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

by Santha Bhattacharji The Book of Margery Kempe, Chapter 18, British Library, Add. MS 61823. Credit: The British Library. This post[i] explores a possible ‘starting point’ for the writing of The Book of Margery Kempe (written c. 1438)[ii], sometimes described as the first autobiography in English. The Book records Margery Kempe’s mystical experiences, embedded in […]

The British Library last year completed a project digitising and cataloguing manuscripts connected with Medieval and Renaissance Women. The full list has been published and you can download the full list here. Unfortunately due to the cyber attack on the British Library late last year, the links to the digitized manuscripts do not currently work. […]

Women and Medieval Literary Culture From the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century Women and Medieval Literary Culture from the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century is a new volume published by Cambridge University Press in August 2023 and the latest output of the Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon network. It unpacks the […]

by Ruth Wiggins When I am gone / will my successor / some sister / of the future / lift my books to her face / and find me / in them (Ruth Wiggins, ‘Dolls of lead’) I would describe myself as a walking poet. By this I mean that many of my poems have […]

Teresa Pilgrim, University of Surrey C/W: In this paper I discuss sexual violence and conversion therapy in the shared yet distinct contexts of Black Lives and Trans Bodies. Ethically, I cannot speak for Black trauma. Therefore, I speak for trauma born of the violent suppression of gender queer identity and queerness. Due to the religious […]

Women’s Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages Speaking Internationally Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, medieval women’s writing has been the subject of energetic conversation and debate. This interest, however, has focused predominantly on western European writers working within the Christian tradition: the Saxon visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude […]