Medievalists demonstrate how a focus on gender can transform an approach to literary texts and genres. The essays in this annual English Association volume provide useful examples of how the conventions behind and the expectations evoked by literary modes and genres help to shape what purports to be an entirely essential and/or socially constructed aspect of identity of the 'he', 'she', or 'I' of the literary text. Ranging across materials from Old English Biblical poetry and hagiography to the late Middle English romances and fabliaux, the essays are united by a commitment to a variety of traditional scholarly methodologies. But each examines afresh an important aspect of what it means to be man or women, husband, son, mother, daughter, wife, devotee or love in the context of particular kinds of medieval literary texts. Contributors ANNE MARIE D'ARCY, HUGH MAGENNIS, DAVID SALTER, MARY SWAN, ELAINE TREHARNE, GREG WALKER.

Wide-ranging study of gender and the underlying ideologies of Old French and Occitan literature.

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.

"A volume of the first importance to the scholarship of medieval women writers.... An ambitious attempt to understand hat 'gender' and 'text' might have meant in the Middle Ages from the perspective of the woman writer and reader rather than through the more usual androcentric lens...[The] collection brings together for the first time in one place essays about a whole range of women writers from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries and from places as distant as Spain and Sweden, as well as the more well-known French and English writers."--Laurie Finke, Kenyon College "Brings together, under three main categories, diverse methodologies from...some of the foremost scholars and interpreters of each type of material and approach."--Nadia Margolis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst The women who spoke or wrote in the margins of the Middle Ages--women who were oppressed and diminished by social and religious institutions--often were not literate. Or, if they could read, they did not know how to write. Transforming or subverting Western and patristic traditions associated with the clergy, they also turned to Eastern and North African traditions and to popular oral theater, and focused in their choice of genre on lyric, romance, and confessional autobiography. These essays analyze their texts and reconstruct a medieval feminine aesthetic that begins a rewriting of cultural and literary history. Jane Chance is professor of English at Rice University. She has written or edited 13 books on Old and Middle English literature, mythology, medieval women, and modern medievalism, including Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433-1177 (UPF, 1994), Woman as Hero in Old English Literature, the Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England (UPF 1990), and Christine de Pizan, The Letter of Othea to Hector, Translated, with Introduction and Interpretive Essay. She is the editor of the Focus Library of Medieval Women.

Essays on a variety of medieval women, which will grant readers a more complete view of medieval women’s lives broadly speaking. These essays largely take a new perspective on their subjects, pushing readers to reconsider preconceived notions about medieval women, authority, and geography. This book will expand the knowledge base of our readers by introducing them to non-canonical and non-European subjects.

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.