Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages

Abstract

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen a sustained recovery of women’s writing across the Globe. Yet despite this process of reclamation, in the period between 500 and 1500 CE, there were still far fewer women recorded than men. While it is difficult to generalize about the challenges that women writers faced living and working in diverse civilizations and centuries, barriers arising from the perceived inferiority of women, such as their exclusion from definitions of, and positions of, authority and their more limited access to formal education, as well as their frequent confinement to the domestic sphere, were all too present in a wide array of cultures. Much of the early women’s writing that does survive – in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia as well as in Europe – is spiritual or devotional in content, no doubt because it was primarily through religion that women could claim a voice otherwise denied to them. Yet we do know that women also composed works on secular matters – in the form of court poetry or personal letters, to give just two examples. Furthermore, the last three decades of research into medieval women’s writing have offered far greater insights into the complexities of women’s engagements with literary texts, not only as writers, but also as archivists, commentators, compilers, patrons, readers, scribes, and translators. Consequently, this encyclopedia includes works for as well as by women across the globe, to give a fuller picture of women’s literary culture in the period under scrutiny, the 1000-year period between what is, in Western terms, 500–1500 CE.