Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon

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 […]

The martyrdom of St. Cecilia of Rome and St. Valerian. Detail from a late fifteenth-century Book of Hours. The Hague, KB, 76 F 2. fol. 277r . Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum & Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag. Bron: manuscripts.kb.nl  In the 1380s, a woman has just begun to tell her story, when she remembers another narrative, heard in her teens: “I […]

‘Great Beasts Isolated on Mountains’ (see citations in the text). Image: Crocodile from the Rochester Bestiary. Wikimedia Commons What did it mean to read and write as a medieval woman? This is of course one of the big questions that the Women’s Literary Culture network is investigating: scholarly work on the writings of Margery Kempe […]

Personal motto and signature of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, British Library MS Harley 4431, f. 1r  Copyright British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts On the opening page of British Library Harley 4431, a collected works of Christine de Pizan, there is a small inscription. If you look only once you are likely to miss it – […]

Chaucer, Ellesmere Manuscript. Image from Wikimedia Commons My most recent book project, entitled Chaucer and Religious Controversies from the Middle Ages to the Augustan Age, adopts the comparative, boundary crossing approach that generally characterizes my research. In this project, however, I shift my attention from texts and figures that are, by and large, relatively unknown […]

The Paradiesgärtlein (Garden of Paradise), c. 1410, The Upper Rhenish Master, Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Public Domain (Wikipedia Commons) When thinking about medieval women and the enclosed garden, we commonly recall the Song of Solomon or the Song of Songs: ‘hortus conclusus soror mea sponsa hortus conclusus fons signatus’ (4:12). Interpreted by the Church Fathers as […]