Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

  Royal 14 E III f. 125v. Source: https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=54938 Within the landscape of medieval literature, Old French Arthurian romance provides a rich cast of women as subjects. The works of Chrétien de Troyes give us Guinevere, Enide, Fenice, Laudine, and Lunete. These are characters with developed personalities who frequently drive the plot of the romances […]

Project Image (Wikimedia Commons) And so my two and half years’ association with the Leverhulme Trust Project, Women’s Literary Culture & the Medieval Canon, draws to a close. It’s a good opportunity for me to stop fiddling with spreadsheets awhile and ponder what I have learned as a result of contact, for the first time […]

The letter of Cecily Daune in British Library Add MS 34889 f.166. Screen shot of the digitised image. Copyright The British Library. I am currently working on a project to transform into modern English and poetic form letters by fifteenth-century women connected to the Paston family of Norfolk. The project involves translation from one vernacular […]

Figure 1: Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Ms.65, f.141: A Map of Rome (Wikimedia Commons) As part of my research into late medieval devotional practices and the performance of pilgrimage, I have primarily focused on the unique and idiosyncratic account of Margery Kempe’s travels to Rome and the Holy Land, as a means […]

   [Fol 12v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius E I. My photograph.] Genealogy was fundamental to the medieval imagination, and at the heart of medieval historical writing. Chronicles, as well as romances and hagiography, are based on structures of legacy and succession, and on the genealogical concept that stories from the past justify or contest the […]

  fig. 1 Add. MS 61823, f. 43v. Reproduced with the permission of the British Library. The Book of Margery Kempe records the history of critical attitudes to female piety and devotional practice as much as the life and revelations of a fifteenth-century vowess. Since the rediscovery of the “Salthouse” text in 1934 (London, British […]