Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

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 […]

Lucy is currently an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin, where she’s researching narratives of pregnancy loss and reproductive disorder in late medieval England. Before that, she was at Newnham College, Cambridge, and at the English Faculty there, and that’s where she began writing Female Desire in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women […]

by VK McCarty, General Theological Seminary, NY One of the rather thrilling aspects of crafting this new book—From Their Lips: Voices of the Early Christian Women—has been the sense of embodying women glimpsed in historical artworks and ancient texts; and bringing them to life, making them accessible to readers in the book. Encountering these brave […]

PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE IN ENGLISH, 1400 – PRESENT: A CONFERENCE About this Event Across history people have used letters to communicate. Letters were used in the exchange of news, emotions and opinions; they constructed networks, formed and destroyed friendships and relationships. Personal correspondence has been intrinsic to human society, bonding and breaking links between individuals, family […]

by Alison Hudson, University of Central Florida Image above: Christine de Pizan writing, from a manuscript that contains her autograph (Paris, BnF Français 835, f. 1r). “Who is your favourite pre-modern, female scribe?” If you were to ask any cataloguer, librarian, curator or scholar of pre-modern writing that question, they would probably have a few […]