Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages

Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages PDF Author: Kathryn Loveridge
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 184384656X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Initiates a wider development of inquiries into women's literary cultures to move the reader beyond single geographical, linguistic, cultural and period boundaries. Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, medieval women's writing has been the subject of energetic conversation and debate. This interest, however, has focused predominantly on western European writers working within the Christian tradition: the Saxon visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, for example, and, in England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are cases in point. While this present book acknowledges the huge importance of such writers to women's literary history, it also argues that they should no longer be read solely within a local context. Instead, by putting them into conversation with other literary women and their cultures from wider geographical regions and global cultures - women from eastern Europe and their books, dramas and music; the Welsh gwraig llwyn a pherth (woman of bush and brake); the Indian mystic, Mirabai; Japanese women writers from the Heian period; women saints from across Christian Europe and those of eleventh-century Islam or late medieval Ethiopia; for instance - much more is to be gained in terms of our understanding of the drivers behind and expressions of medieval women's literary activities in far broader contexts. This volume considers the dialogue, synergies, contracts and resonances emerging from such new alignments, and to help a wider, multidirectional development of this enquiry into women's literary cultures.

Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages

Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages PDF Author: Kathryn Loveridge
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 184384656X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book Here

Book Description
Initiates a wider development of inquiries into women's literary cultures to move the reader beyond single geographical, linguistic, cultural and period boundaries. Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, medieval women's writing has been the subject of energetic conversation and debate. This interest, however, has focused predominantly on western European writers working within the Christian tradition: the Saxon visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, for example, and, in England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are cases in point. While this present book acknowledges the huge importance of such writers to women's literary history, it also argues that they should no longer be read solely within a local context. Instead, by putting them into conversation with other literary women and their cultures from wider geographical regions and global cultures - women from eastern Europe and their books, dramas and music; the Welsh gwraig llwyn a pherth (woman of bush and brake); the Indian mystic, Mirabai; Japanese women writers from the Heian period; women saints from across Christian Europe and those of eleventh-century Islam or late medieval Ethiopia; for instance - much more is to be gained in terms of our understanding of the drivers behind and expressions of medieval women's literary activities in far broader contexts. This volume considers the dialogue, synergies, contracts and resonances emerging from such new alignments, and to help a wider, multidirectional development of this enquiry into women's literary cultures.

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.

Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture

Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture PDF Author: Jennifer Nancy Brown
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9781903153437
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
(An) admirable collection. . For anyone interested in what Wogan-Browne calls "the historiography of female community", nuns' libraries and literacy, and Barking abbey itself, this first-class collection of essays is essential reading. CATHOLIC HISTORICAL REVIEW Essays on the texts produced at Barking Abbey - one of the most important centres for writings in the Middle Ages.

Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe

Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe PDF Author: Laura Kalas
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526146606
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of ‘encounter’ – textual, internal, external and performative – the volume offers a capacious exploration of The Book of Margery Kempe, characterised by multiple complementary and dissonant approaches. It employs a multiplicity of scholarly and critical lenses, including the intertextual history of medieval women’s literary culture, medical humanities, history of science, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the global Middle Ages, archival research and creative re-imagining. Revealing several new discoveries about Margery Kempe and her Book in its global contexts, and offering multiple ways of reading the Book in the modern world, it will be an essential companion for years to come.

Same Bodies, Different Women

Same Bodies, Different Women PDF Author: Christopher Mielke
Publisher: Trivent Publishing
ISBN: 6158122238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This volume is a collection of essays focusing on marginalized women mostly in Central and Eastern Europe from around 1350 to 1650. "Other" women are discussed in three different categories: women whose religious practices put them on the social margins, "common women" who are in society but not of society because they are in the sex trade, and women whose occupations were reason enough to shunt them. In order to fill a gap in gender history for countries east of the Rhine River, the studies included present how official city-funded brothels in medieval Austria worked, how a princess' disability affected her life as Byzantine empress, how one unmarried Transylvanian woman who got pregnant dealt with being the center of a court case, and how enslaved women in medieval Hungary were treated as sexual property. The hope with this volume is that it will show the many interdisciplinary ways that women on the margins can be studied in this region, and to diminish the taboo of discussing this topic to begin with.

A History of Old English Literature

A History of Old English Literature PDF Author: Robert D. Fulk
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470692839
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This timely introduction to Old English literature focuses on the production and reception of Old English texts, and on their relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture. Introduces Old English texts and considers their relation to Anglo-Saxon culture. Responds to renewed emphasis on historical and cultural contexts in the field of medieval studies. Treats virtually the entire range of textual types preserved in Old English. Considers the production, reception and uses of Old English texts. Integrates the Anglo-Latin backgrounds crucial to understanding Old English literature. Offers very extensive bibliographical guidance. Demonstrates that Anglo-Saxon studies is uniquely placed to contribute to current literary debates.

From Their Lips

From Their Lips PDF Author: V. K. McCarty
Publisher: Gorgias Press
ISBN: 9781463242565
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
"The Eastern Church venerates among its saints several Early Christian women whose teaching and wisdom contribute to the depth of our theological heritage. Their inspired voices can be heard at work witnessing: in the New Testament, in the early centuries of the Church Fathers and throughout the Byzantine era. Readers will find this volume bringing female leaders from the Early Church to life from the traditional ancient sources and sharing their experience of the presence of God. Their remembered advice to followers still illuminates issues of faith and justice which bind us together as Christians today"--

Virginia Woolf's Renaissance

Virginia Woolf's Renaissance PDF Author: Juliet Dusinberre
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349256447
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Dusinberre's book explores Woolf's search, in The Common Reader and other non-fictional writings, for an alternative literary tradition for women. Of equal interest to students of Virginia Woolf and of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing, it discusses Montaigne, Donne, Sir John Harington, Dorothy Osborne, Madame de Sevigne, Pepys and Bunyan, together with forms of writing, such as essays, letters and diaries, traditionally associated with women. Questions about printing, the body and the relation between amateurs and professionals create fascinating connections between the early modern period and Virginia Woolf.

Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature

Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Linda Lomperis
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812213645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature forges a new link between contemporary feminist and cultural theory and medieval history and literature. The essays establish crucial historical connections between feminist theorizing about the body and specific accounts of gendered bodies in medieval texts.

Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages

Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Cate Gunn
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846624
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Essays on women and devotional literature in the Middle Ages in commemoration and celebration of the respected feminist scholar Catherine Innes-Parker. Silence was a much-lauded concept in the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of religious literature directed at women. Based on the Pauline prescription that women should neither preach nor teach, and should at all times keep speech to a minimum, the concept of silence lay at the forefront of many devotional texts, particularly those associated with various forms of women's religious enclosure. Following the example of the Virgin Mary, religious women were exhorted to speak seldom, and then only seriously and devoutly. However, as this volume shows, such gendered exhortations to silence were often more rhetorical than literal. The contributions range widely: they consider the English 'Wooing Group' texts and female-authored visionary writings from the Saxon nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century; works by Richard Rolle and the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec in the fourteenth century; Anglo-French treatises, and books housed in the library of the English noblewoman Cecily Neville in the fifteenth century; and the resonant poetics of women from non-Christian cultures. But all demonstrate the ways in which silence, rather than being a mere absence of speech, frequently comprised a form of gendered articulation and proto-feminist point of resistance. They thus provide an apt commemoration and celebration of the deeply innovative work of Catherine Innes-Parker (1956-2019), the respected feminist scholar and a pioneer of this important field of study.