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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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 in England in the Middle Ages

Women in England in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Jennifer Ward
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826419852
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Medieval women faced many of the problems of their modern counterparts in bringing up their families, balancing family and work, and responding to the demands of their communities. Of many women in the period of a thousand years before 1500 we know little or nothing, though their typical ways of life, on farms or in the towns, can be reconstructed with accuracy from a variety of sources. We know more about a far smaller number of elite women, including queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Margaret of Anjou; noblewomen, whose characters and attitudes can be sensed directly or indirectly; and a variety of religious women. Literary sources help flesh out real attitudes, such as those of Chaucer's Wife of Bath. Jennifer Ward shows the life-cycle of medieval women, from birth, via marriage and child-rearing, to widowhood and death. She also brings out the slow changes in the position of women over a millennium.

Julian of Norwich's Showings

Julian of Norwich's Showings PDF Author: Denise Nowakowski Baker
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400863910
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
The first woman known to have written in English, the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich has inspired generations of Christians with her reflections on the "motherhood" of Jesus, and her assurance that, despite evil, "all shall be well." In this book, Denise Baker reconsiders Julian not only as an eloquent and profound visionary but also as an evolving, sophisticated theologian of great originality. Focusing on Julian's Book of Showings, in which the author records a series of revelations she received during a critical illness in May 1373, Baker provides the first historical assessment of Julian's significance as a writer and thinker. Inscribing her visionary experience in the short version of her Showings, Julian contemplated the revelations for two decades before she achieved the understanding that enabled her to complete the long text. Baker first traces the genesis of Julian's visionary experience to the practice of affective piety, such as meditations on the life of Christ and, in the arts, a depiction of a suffering rather than triumphant Christ on the cross. Julian's innovations become apparent in the long text. By combining late medieval theology of salvation with the mystics' teachings on the nature of humankind, she arrives at compassionate, optimistic, and liberating conclusions regarding the presence of evil in the world, God's attitude toward sinners, and the possibility of universal salvation. She concludes her theodicy by comparing the connections between the Trinity and humankind to familial relationships, emphasizing Jesus' role as mother. Julian's strategy of revisions and her artistry come under scrutiny in the final chapter of this book, as Baker demonstrates how this writer brings her readers to reenact her own struggle in understanding the revelations. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain

Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain PDF Author: Carme Font
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317231384
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This study examines women’s prophetic writings in seventeenth-century Britain as the literary outcome of a discourse of social transformation that integrates religious conscience, political participation, and gender identity. The following pages approach prophecy as a culture, a language, and a catalyst for collective change as the individual prophet conceptualized it. While the corpus of prophetic writing continues to grow as the result of archival research, this monograph complements our particular knowledge of women’s prophecy in the seventeenth century with a global assessment of what makes speech prophetic in the first place, and what are the differences and similarities between texts that fall into the prophetic mode. These disparities and commonalities stand out in the radical language of prophecy as well as in the way it creates an authorial centre. Examining how authorship is represented in several configurations of prophetic delivery, such as essays on prophecy, poetic prophecy, spiritual autobiography, and election narratives, the different chapters consider why prophecy peaked in the years of the civil wars and how it evolved towards the eighteenth century. The analyses extrapolate the peculiarities of each case study as being representative of a form of textually-based activism that enabled women to gain a deeper understanding of themselves as creators of independent meaning that empowered them as individuals, citizens, and believers.

Medieval Mothering

Medieval Mothering PDF Author: Bonnie Wheeler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134822782
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.