An investigation into texts specifically addressed to women sheds new light on female literary cultures.

Chapter Two argues that Aelred's De institutione inclusarum offers his sister a Christian subjecthood based in virginity and treats her as a fellow spiritual director. Goscelin's Uber confortatorius, on the other hand, does not allow Eve a Christian subject position independent of his intrusive advice. Her Christian subjecthood is conditional on his involvement. In Chapter Three I show how the horizons of possibility for Matilda and Christina's Christian subjecthood exclude relationships with other women. Instead of a Christian subject position constructed with reference to her filial relationship with Margaret, Matilda is steered towards an image of Margaret as a queen who protected the rights of the Church. Similarly, Christina's Christian subjecthood is directed away from same-sex relationships and towards an appreciation of God filtered through her relationship with Abbot Geoffrey and St Albans. Conversely, Chapter Four explains how the saints' lives commissioned for the nuns of Wilton and Barking create a communal Christian subject position for the nuns based in their samesex intimacy with their patron saints, allowing them to bypass the authority of male bishops in their worship.

A consideration of the metaphor of water in religious literature, especially in relation to women.

This book takes an innovative approach to the study of the penitentials and nunnery rules and the ways in which these texts impinged upon the lives of female audiences. The study emphasises the importance of the texts for the promotion of Christian values and of the expectations of churchmen in the construction of appropriate Christian behaviour for women in the early medieval West. These texts constitute the only written works which would have had direct influence upon the lives of lay and religious women. The work focuses upon the elements of the penitentials which provided female-specific expectations, and these fall largely into two categories of sexuality and pre-Christian practices. The nunnery rules seldom provided comprehensive sets of behavioural expectations. Rather, rules emphasised expectations relating to issues of enclosure, work and abstinence which came to be perceived as the defining characteristics of religious women.

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.

Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages is a volume of essays presenting the argument that with the coming of the universities women were excluded, in an apartheid of gender, from education and power. It discusses the resulting paradigm shift from Romanesque to Gothic, describing the images which women had of themselves and which the dominant male society had of them. We meet, in the pages of this book, medieval women in their roles as writers, pilgrims, wives, anchoresses and nuns, at court, on pilgrimage, in households and convents. The volume, as a «Distant Mirror» for ourselves today, seeks to present ways in which women then fulfilled the roles society expected of them and the ways in which they also subverted - through entering into textuality - the expectations of the dominating culture in order to quest identity and equality.

An overlooked aspect of the iconography of the Annunciation investigated - Mary's book.