Abstract
The majority of women’s Latin poetry from the early Middle Ages was written by religious women, as they were more likely to have the level of Latin required as well as the time to compose. Much of this poetry survives seemingly by chance, in the letter collections preserved on the death of famous men. The extant poetry, from both court and cloister, suggests that there were a large number of women able to write poetry and that patchy survival explains the relative dearth of this work in the present. Even with this limitation, there are still a range of named women poets whose work survives, from Radegund in the sixth century to Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century.
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Maude, K. (2022). Early Latin Women Poets. In: Sauer, M.M., Watt, D., McAvoy, L.H. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76219-3_18-1
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