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The Suffragette and the Nun: Christopher St John and Hrotsvit of Gandersheim
by Sue Niebrzydowski, University of Bangor In 2018 celebrations are being held throughout the United Kingdom to mark the centenary of women who owned property and were over thirty getting the vote. Feminist medievalists will be delighted, and very possibly surprised, to learn that the first female dramatist, Hrotsvit, canoness of Gandersheim Abbey (c.935 – […]
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Eve of Wilton: the Anchorite, her Cell, and Medieval Women’s Literary Culture in England and the Continent
Anchorite’s Cell, St Nicholas, Compton. (c) Heike Bauer. Reproduced with permission. by Diane Watt, University of Surrey Anchorites were individuals, sometime laypeople rather than members of formal monastic orders, who lived a life of religious contemplation focused on prayer and devotion to the Eucharist. Theirs was a life of extreme enclosure, as they were quite […]
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The Name of the Rose: The Rose and Authorial Persona in ‘Roman de La Rose’ and ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’.
Figure 1. Above, Narcissus at the fountain; Amant with Oiseuse at the gate. Below, the Dreamer in bed. Printed by kind permission of the British Library (London, British Library, MS Egerton 1069, fol. 1r) By Teresa Pilgrim, Birkbeck, University of London As an undergraduate, I was first drawn to Roman de la Rose (1225-1278) […]
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Meeting Margery Kempe
by Diane Watt, University of Surrey This post is derived from part of the closing plenary that I delivered at the conference Margery Kempe Studies in the 21st Century, held at University College Oxford, 5th-7th April 2018. The inauguration of the Margery Kempe Society was announced at the conference. In 1985, I was an […]
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The Abbess of Streonshalh, St. Margaret of Antioch and Julian of Norwich
Dr J. J. McFarlane, April, 2018 Whitby Abbey 1 by Chris Kirk 1 License: CC BY 2. Caedmon’s Hymn or Song (c.660-680) is celebrated as the fount of English vernacular poetry. The story of Caedmon and a prose summary of his Hymn, together with a note on the translation, appear in the Latin versions of […]
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