Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages: Speaking Internationally

Description

Initiates a wider development of inquiries into women's literary cultures to move the reader beyond single geographical, linguistic, cultural and period boundaries. Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, medieval women's writing has been the subject of energetic conversation and debate. This interest, however, has focused predominantly on western European writers working within the Christian tradition: the Saxon visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, for example, and, in England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are cases in point. While this present book acknowledges the huge importance of such writers to women's literary history, it also argues that they should no longer be read solely within a local context. Instead, by putting them into conversation with other literary women and their cultures from wider geographical regions and global cultures - women from eastern Europe and their books, dramas and music; the Welsh gwraig llwyn a pherth (woman of bush and brake); the Indian mystic, Mirabai; Japanese women writers from the Heian period; women saints from across Christian Europe and those of eleventh-century Islam or late medieval Ethiopia; for instance - much more is to be gained in terms of our understanding of the drivers behind and expressions of medieval women's literary activities in far broader contexts. This volume considers the dialogue, synergies, contracts and resonances emerging from such new alignments, and to help a wider, multidirectional development of this enquiry into women's literary cultures. Front cover Contents Foreword Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Part 1 Comparison and Dialogue 1 Parallel Affective Communities in Islamic and Christian Hagiography 2 Women’s Mystical Friendships: Margery Kempe and Mirabai 3 Women’s Writing in the Japanese Heian Period Part 2 Constructing Gender and Genre 4 The Genre of the Late Medieval Personalised Orthodox Slavic Women’s Miscellany 5 The Role of Kisaeng Sijo Poets in Medieval Korean Literature 6 Gender, Authority and Paradox in ‘Attār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyā’ and the Mantiq al-tayr 7 Deception, Infanticide, and the Making of a Female Saint Part 3 Saintly Performance and Marian Piety 8 A European Context for the Worshipful Wives of Chester and their Marian Play 9 Mary and Elizabeth: Male Perspectives of Female-Coded Piety 10 Speaking Internationally in Female Communities on the Eastern Borders of Medieval Europe 11 The Coming to Rest of Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Writing in the Late Middle Ages 12 Negotiating the Abject and the Sublime Part 4 Evidence and the Archives: Revisiting and Reconsidering 13 ‘Ic þæt secgan mæg’: Women, Song, Story, Presence 14 Llwyn a Pherth and Sexual Deviancy in Medieval Wales 15 ‘I shall send yw money to by such stufe as I wull haue’: The Paston shoppers Afterword: Intersectionality and Coalitions List of Contributors Bibliography Index Gender in the Middle Ages