Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

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 […]

   In my last blog in May, I wrote about literature celebrating Virgin Martyrs in the first part of my medieval novel, The Errant Hours.  In this post, I will focus on the Arthurian legend – The Knight with the Lion/The Lady of the Well, which informed the second part. The location of the novel […]

An illuminated initial from the Wilton Psalter, showing a group of nuns reading (my photograph) For a woman to read as a woman is not to repeat an identity or an experience that is given but to play a role she constructs with reference to her identity as a woman, which is also a construct, […]