Liz Herbert McAvoy

Michelle M. Sauer

Diane Watt

This is the first encyclopedia devoted exclusively to medieval women’s writing globally. Focusing on the thousand-year period between 500-1500, this comprehensive reference work addresses a long-standing gap in scholarship on women writers from this period. It challenges current understandings of the literary tradition of women by incorporating early writers and texts that remain marginal and by expanding definitions of textual composition to include more collaborative and contextual activities. This encyclopedia also presents women in the context of the global Middle Ages. Entries extend beyond works written in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to include works by women from Europe, Africa, and Asia. By locating medieval women’s writing within its cultural, social, religious, and political contexts, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages will be an ideal entry point for students and researchers coming into the field, and a valuable resource for established scholars.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, the arresting motif of the walled garden - especially in its manifestation as a sacred or love-inflected hortus conclusus - was a common literary device. Usually associated with the Virgin Mary or the Lady of popular romance, it appeared in myriad literary and iconographic forms, largely for its aesthetic, decorative and symbolic qualities. This study focuses on the more complex metaphysical functions and meanings attached to it between 1100 and 1400 - and, in particular, those associated with the gardens of Eden and the Song of Songs. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender, gardens, landscape and space, it traces specifically the resurfacing and reworking of the idea and image of the enclosed garden within the writings of medieval holy women and other female-coded texts. In so doing, it presents the enclosed garden as generator of a powerfully gendered hermeneutic imprint within the medieval religious imaginary - indeed, as an alternative "language" used to articulate those highly complex female-coded approaches to God that came to dominate late-medieval religiosity. The book also responds to the "eco-turn" in our own troubled times that attempts to return the non-human to the centre of public and private discourse. The texts under scrutiny therefore invite responses as both literary and "garden" spaces where form often reflects content, and where their authors are also diligent "gardeners" the apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve, for example; the horticulturally-inflected Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenburg and the "green" philosophies of Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias; the visionary writings of Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn collaborating within their Helfta nunnery; the Middle English poem, Pearl; and multiple reworkings of the deeply problematic and increasingly sexualized garden enclosing the biblical figure of Susanna.

The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary

Elizabeth Cox

Roberta Magnani

A consideration of the ways in which the past was framed and remembered in the pre-modern world.

Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture

An examination of the growth and different varieties of anchoritism throughout medieval Europe.

Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe

An examination of the importance of anchoritism to social, cultural and religious life in the middle ages.

Gender, Space and the Solitary Life

Medieval Anchoritisms

An examination of ways in which the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe were affected by traditional and contemporary attitudes towards women.

Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe

Margery Kempe

Margery (Kempe)

Margery Kempe's text draws on her maternal, female body to illuminate her relationship to the divine.

An Abridged Translation

The Book of Margery Kempe

One of the most important medieval writers studied in historical and literary context.

Liz Herbert McAvoy

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