Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

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, […]

Chapel of Sant Llàtzer. Photo: Enfo. (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License) There is a famous scene in The Book of Margery Kempe in which Margery meets with a woman described in the text as a “Senyt Brydis mayden” [St. Birgitta’s maidservant]. Devotion to and imitation of Birgitta of Sweden is one of the key features […]

Image from The Taymouth Hours, BL Yates Thompson 13, f.68v I am quite convinced that if you scratched most writers of medieval fiction, under the surface you would find a childhood spent reading stories about the middle ages: Robin Hood, Arthurian Myths, Fairy Tales. Perhaps you would also find a longstanding love of medieval imagery […]

Liber Manualis: Paris, BnF, ms. 12293, XI, 2, 3-12 (Creative Commons Licence) The Liber Manualis was written in Uzes (in Septimania) by Dhuoda, wife of Duke Bernard, between 30th November 841 and 2nd February 843 (XI, 2, 2-5). The text is addressed to William, his firstborn son. The title liber manualis  is a classical expression: […]

An image of St. Catherine of Siena from a 15th-century roodscreen at Holy Trinity Church, Torbryan, Devon (my photograph) The Middle Ages was not devoid of women in politics. Women ruled kingdoms, they waged war, they managed armies and households and fiefdoms in their husbands’ and fathers’ absences. But most of these women were “to the […]

Saint Mechtildis, Iconographic Collections ICV No 33837. Image from the Wellcome Library, London When I set out to write a doctoral thesis on the subject of household imagery in Middle English devotional texts, I’m not sure I was expecting to find such a huge number of domestic metaphors, allegories and allusions. At the very beginning […]