Literary Production Before and After the Conquest

Abstract

The role of women in literary culture from the late tenth to the mid-twelfth century forces us to reframe the parameters within which we conventionally situate texts and authors, and to interrogate the expectations we bring to literary studies. The dynamics of writing in this period challenge us to reconsider modern assumptions about authorship and agency, presenting models of female patronage, collaboration, and a range of complex transactions and collusions which facilitate and shape literary production. The evidence of the period c.980-1140 also urges us to question the very notion of ‘Britishness’ in relation to literature: the texts generated by these women resist national categorization in modern terms, instead linking the literary, linguistic, and political cultures of the British Isles, the European continent, and Scandinavia. New scholarship is focusing attention on women’s roles within this complex historical context, and in particular on the ways in which female patrons used texts to negotiate and intervene in the rapidly changing cultural and political world on either side of the Norman Conquest.