Writing a History of British Women’sWriting from 700 to 1500

Abstract

How can a history of British women’swriting be written? Such a project must necessarily be collaborative if it is to attempt to be comprehensive, but even then any claim to comprehensiveness has to be qualified: paradoxically the more expansive the history, the more partial it will be. The challenges of writing such a history are perhaps even greater for scholars working in the early periods because we are forced to confront and to rethink many deeply ingrained assumptions about women’swriting. This volume focuses on a period of literary history that is often marginalized in accounts of women’swriting in English: the Middle Ages. It is a widely accepted view that there are only two women writers in English in the period before 1500, and therefore there is little to be said for an age (or ages) when women writers were so much an exception. Furthermore, the two medieval English women writers whose names are widely known, Julian of Norwich (1342/3–after 1416) and Margery Kempe (c. 1373–after 1439), did not think of themselves as writers or authors. Nor were they responsible for literature as it is thought of today — they did not compose poetry, or romances, or fiction of any sort. Even these two ‘named’ women writers do not comfortably fit established evolutionary models of women’sliterary history over the longue durée, with their emphases on the spread of literacy, the bias towards print culture, and the emergence of the woman poet, and ultimately of the professional author of drama or fiction.¹