Women and Literature in Britain, 1150-1500

Women and Literature in Britain, 1150-1500 PDF Author: Carol M. Meale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052140018X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of essays focuses on the questions of women's access to a written culture in medieval Britain and their representation within it. It explores women's engagement with Anglo-Norman, English and Welsh as well as Latin, and addresses issues including orality and literacy and women's exclusion from a written tradition. It considers the question of the levels of literacy attained by women, and contemporary attitudes to their acquisition of such skills, as well as the historical evidence for women's activity as writers, patrons and readers. It also examines the representation of women within different literary genres, both secular and religious - their possession or lack of power, and their roles as lovers, mothers and saints. This is the first such volume to focus on these issues within the specific framework of late medieval Britain, and as such constitutes a unique contribution to the study of women and medieval literary history.

Women and Literature in Britain, 1150-1500

Women and Literature in Britain, 1150-1500 PDF Author: Carol M. Meale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052140018X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of essays focuses on the questions of women's access to a written culture in medieval Britain and their representation within it. It explores women's engagement with Anglo-Norman, English and Welsh as well as Latin, and addresses issues including orality and literacy and women's exclusion from a written tradition. It considers the question of the levels of literacy attained by women, and contemporary attitudes to their acquisition of such skills, as well as the historical evidence for women's activity as writers, patrons and readers. It also examines the representation of women within different literary genres, both secular and religious - their possession or lack of power, and their roles as lovers, mothers and saints. This is the first such volume to focus on these issues within the specific framework of late medieval Britain, and as such constitutes a unique contribution to the study of women and medieval literary history.

Medieval Women's Writing

Medieval Women's Writing PDF Author: Diane Watt
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745632556
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800

Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800 PDF Author: Vivien Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521586801
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, first published in 2000, is an authoritative volume of new essays on women's writing and reading in the eighteenth century.

Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook

Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook PDF Author: Carolyne Larrington
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134843321
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
Carolyne Larrington has gathered together a uniquely comprehensive collection of writing by, for and about medieval women, spanning one thousand years and Europe from Iceland to Byzantiu. The extracts are arranged thematically, dealing with the central areas of medieval women's lives and their relation to social and cultural institutions. Each section is contextualised with a brief historical introduction, and the materials span literary, historical, theological and other narrative and imaginative writing. The writings here uncover and confound the stereotype of the medieval woman as lady or virgin by demonstrating the different roles and meanings that the sign of woman occupied in the imaginative space of the medieval period. Larrington's clear and accessible editorial material and the modern English translations of all the extracts mean this work is ideally suited for students. Women and Writing in Early Europe: A Sourcebook also contains an extensive and fully up-to-date bibliography, making it not only essential reading for undergraduates and post graduates but also a valuable tool for scholars.

Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700

Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700 PDF Author: Elaine V. Beilin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351964968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume includes leading scholarship on five writers active in the first half of the sixteenth century: Margaret More Roper, Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mildred Cooke Cecil and Anne Cooke Bacon. The essays represent a range of theoretical approaches and provide valuable insights into the religious, social, economic and political contexts essential for understanding these writers' texts. Scholars examine the significance of Margaret More Roper's translations and letters in the contexts of humanism, family relationships and changing cultural forces; the contributions of Katherine Parr and Anne Askew to Reformation discourses and debates; and the material presence of Mildred Cooke Cecil and Anne Cooke Bacon in the intellectual, religious and political life of their time. The introduction surveys the development of the field as an interdisciplinary project involving literature, history, classics, religion and cultural studies.

Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination

Women's Genealogies in the Medieval Literary Imagination PDF Author: Emma O. Bérat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009434772
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
Uncovering the many striking female alternatives to patrilineal narratives in medieval texts, Emma O. Bérat explores strategies of writing and illustration that creatively and purposefully depict women's legacies. Genealogy, used to justify a character's present power and project it onto the future, was crucial to medieval political, literary, and historical thought. While patrilineage often limited women to exceptional or passive roles, other genealogical forms that represent and promote women's claims are widespread in medieval texts. Female characters transmit power through book patronage and reading, enduring landmarks, and international travel, as well as childbearing and succession. These flexible – if messy – genealogies reflect the web of political, biological, and spiritual relations that frequently characterized elite women's lives. Examining hagiography, chronicles, genealogical rolls, and French, English, and Latin romances, as well as associated codices and images, Bérat highlights the centrality of female characters and historical women to this fundamental aspect of medieval consciousness.

Ravishing Maidens

Ravishing Maidens PDF Author: Kathryn Gravdal
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200330
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this study of sexual violence and rape in French medieval literature and law, Kathryn Gravdal examines an array of famous works never before analyzed in connection with sexual violence. Gravdal demonstrates the variety of techniques through which medieval discourse made rape acceptable: sometimes through humor and aestheticization, sometimes through the use of social and political themes, but especially through the romanticism of rape scenes.

Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100

Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 PDF Author: Diane Watt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474270646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Women's Books of Hours in Medieval England

Women's Books of Hours in Medieval England PDF Author: Charity Scott-Stokes
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843843005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book Here

Book Description
English translation of a variety of texts from women's books of hours, with introduction, notes, and an interpretive essay. The book of hours is said to have been the most popular book owned by the laity in the later Middle Ages. This volume brings together a selection of texts taken from books of hours known to have been owned by women. While some will be familiar from bibles or prayer-books, others have to be sought in specialist publications, often embedded in other material, and a few have not until now been available at all in modern editions or translations. The texts arecomplemented by an introduction setting the book of hours in its context, an interpretive essay, glossary and annotated bibliography.

Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700

Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700 PDF Author: Helen Wilcox
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521467773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
First comprehensive introduction to women's role in, and access to, literary culture in early modern Britain.