The History of British Women�s Writing, 700�1500

By: Diane Watt and Liz Herbert Mcavoy

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Synopsis: This volume focuses on women's literary history in Britain between 700 and 1500, a period traditionally marginalized in accounts of women's writing in English. Such marginalization, the editors argue, has been brought about in part by the erroneous assumption that there were no women writers operating in Britain before the emergence of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The History of British Women's Writing 700-1500 therefore vigorously refutes this premise by focusing on a wide range of texts written by, for, and in collaboration with women from the Anglo-Saxon period through to the beginning of the sixteenth century. By also considering women's writing in the context of the deeply multicultural and multilingual milieu which was medieval 'Britain', it uncovers a wide range of women's literary activity undertaken in Latin, Welsh and Anglo-Norman as well as in the English vernacular and, in so doing, demands a rethinking of the long-established traditions of 'English' literary history and even the concept of 'writing' itself. "