Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

by Emily Butler, John Carroll University In Anglo-Saxon England, the eleventh century was a time of great upheaval and political turmoil, with serious Viking raids, followed by a Danish conquest first in 1013 and more definitively in 1016, then the more famous Norman Conquest of 1066. One of the most important figures in the first […]

The Egg lecture theatre, University of Bergen Three and a half years ago I started my PhD in medieval literature at the University of Surrey in Guildford. A year later, in 2015, my PhD supervisor, Professor Diane Watt began leading an international network of researchers on the Leverhulme Trust Project, ‘Women’s Literary Culture & the […]

  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 […]