Women's writing in any period remains of critical concern, both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Alexandra Barratt's edition offers a wide range of texts from the period 1300-1500, including: Original texts written by women in the Middle Ages Texts translated by women in the Middle Ages Prayers, meditations, scriptural comment, and accounts of religious experiences Educational writings Romance, poetry Each poem is given a headnote, giving details of composition, manuscript and sources. Full on-page annotation is provided giving details of allusions to contemporary religious, historical and social issues. A general introduction gives context to all the pieces and provides a penetrating account of the role of women in a burgeoning society of literary and cultural transmission.

Medieval Women's Writing is a major new contribution to our understanding of women's writing in England, 1100-1500. The most comprehensive account to date, it includes writings in Latin and French as well as English, and works for as well as by women. Marie de France, Clemence of Barking, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and the Paston women are discussed alongside the Old English lives of women saints, The Life of Christina of Markyate, the St Albans Psalter, and the legends of women saints by Osbern Bokenham. Medieval Women's Writing addresses these key questions: Who were the first women authors in the English canon? What do we mean by women's writing in the Middle Ages? What do we mean by authorship? How can studying medieval writing contribute to our understanding of women's literary history? Diane Watt argues that female patrons, audiences, readers, and even subjects contributed to the production of texts and their meanings, whether written by men or women. Only an understanding of textual production as collaborative enables us to grasp fully women's engagement with literary culture. This radical rethinking of early womens literary history has major implications for all scholars working on medieval literature, on ideas of authorship, and on women's writing in later periods. The book will become standard reading for all students of these debates.

Women's literary histories usually start in the later Middle Ages, but recent scholarship has shown that actually women were at the heart of the emergence of the English literary tradition. Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 focuses on the period before the so-called 'Barking Renaissance' of women's writing in the 12th century. By examining the surviving evidence of women's authorship, as well as the evidence of women's engagement with literary culture more widely, Diane Watt argues that early women's writing was often lost, suppressed, or deliberately destroyed. In particular she considers the different forms of male 'overwriting', to which she ascribes the multiple connotations of 'destruction', 'preservation', 'control' and 'suppression'. She uses the term to describe the complex relationship between male authors and their female subjects to capture the ways in which texts can attempt to control and circumscribe female autonomy. Written by one of the leading experts in medieval women's writing, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 examines women's literary engagement in monasteries such as Ely, Whitby, Barking and Wilton Abbey, as well as letters and hagiographies from the 8th and 9th centuries. Diane Watt provides a much-needed look at women's writing in the early medieval period that is crucial to understanding women's literary history more broadly.

This is one of the first anthologies devoted to the writings of women in the Middle Ages. The fifteen women whose works are represented span seven centuries, eight languages, and ten regions or nationalities. Many are recognized, taught, and anthologized in their own countries but have been inaccessible to students in English. Others are little read today because their literary fortunes have paralleled fluctuations in literary taste and literary patronage. Katharina M. Wilson's introduction to the volume places these writers in historical context and explores the question of the female imagination and who these women were who were writing at a time when very few women were literate and most literature, sacred and secular, was penned by men. Each of the fifteen chapters has been written by a different scholar and includes a biographical and critical introduction to the writer, a representative selection of her works in translation, and a bibliography.

Translation and facing text of an important female-authored work from the late middle ages.

Privileging both a transnational and a sociological approach, this volume explores the position of women in the early modern literary field, emphasising the international scope of their literature and examining their historical position, influence, network and dialogues.

In Inventing Womanhood, Tara Williamsinvestigates new ideas about womanhood that arose in fourteenth-century Britain and evolved throughout the fifteenth century. In the aftermath of the plague and the substantial cultural shifts of the late 1300s, female roles expanded temporarily. As a result, the dominant models of maiden, wife, and widow could no longer adequately describe women's roles and lives. Middle English writers responded by experimenting with new ways of representing women across a variety of genres, from courtly poetry to devotional texts and from royal correspondence to cycle plays. In particular, writers coined new terms, including "womanhood" and "femininity," and refashioned others, such as "motherhood." These experiments allowed writers to develop and define a larger idea of womanhood underlying more specific identities like wife or mother and to re-imagine women's relationships to different kinds of authority--generally masculine and frequently religious. By exploring the medieval origins of some of our most important gender vocabulary, Inventing Womanhood defamiliarizes our modern usage, which often treats those terms as etymologically transparent and almost limitlessly capacious. It also restores a necessary historical and linguistic dimension to gender studies, providing the groundwork for reconsidering how that language and the categories it creates have determined the ways in which gender has been imagined since the Middle Ages.

This volume brings together specialists from different areas of medieval literary study to focus on the role of habits of thought in shaping attitudes toward women during the Middle Ages. The essays range from Old English literature to the Spanish Inquisition and encompass such genres as romance, chronicles, hagiography, and legal documents.

Taking as its guiding emblem Christine de Pizan's metaphor of a city of ladies, this volume refuses to treat the medieval woman writer as an anomaly, a lone genius who somehow managed to transcend the limitations of her sex. It insists that women have always participated fully, if not equally, with men in the creation of culture, even during the Middle Ages, and it examines the record of women's cultural participation in medieval England. Women's Writing in English: Medieval England examines women's writing not only in traditional genres such as poetry, drama, and romance, but in a variety of genres which are often excluded from literary canons including medical treatises, correspondence, and the visionary and devotional genres in which women wrote most prolifically.

Women's writing in any period remains of critical concern, both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Alexandra Barratt's edition offers a wide range of texts from the period 1300-1500, including: Original texts written by women in the Middle Ages Texts translated by women in the Middle Ages Prayers, meditations, scriptural comment, and accounts of religious experiences Educational writings Romance, poetry Each poem is given a headnote, giving details of composition, manuscript and sources. Full on-page annotation is provided giving details of allusions to contemporary religious, historical and social issues. A general introduction gives context to all the pieces and provides a penetrating account of the role of women in a burgeoning society of literary and cultural transmission.