Emma Wilson

Women authors of the Middle Ages

There is much to be gleaned on the topic of women writers of the Middle Ages simply from the existence of such an entry in a literary history. The reader will note immediately that there is no parallel article on male authors, a category so big as to be unthinkable as a single unit. On the one hand, it is reasonable to assume that the topic of women authors is small and circumscribed enough to fit comfortably into relatively few words. On the other hand, however, the inclusion of such an article implies that even if limited in scope, the topic is important enough in our current understanding of the Middle Ages to merit its own discussion. We can never know how many of the anonymous authors of the Middle Ages might, in fact, have been ‘anonyma’. All we know for certain is that the list of women authors of that era to whom we can reliably attach a name, a biography, and a list of works is very small indeed. The spectrum broadens somewhat when we consider women authors of lyric poetry whose names we do not know, poetry written in a womans voice that may or may not be authored by women, and the existence of women authors in the fictional realm, all of which we will consider briefly here. Whether for fictional or historically verifiable women authors, the sine qua non for participation in literary culture was access to education and to the necessary means of production.

Manuscripts and manuscript culture

The study and interpretation of medieval literature is inseparable from the conditions of its circulation in handwritten copies. In Paris, the first printing press was installed in 1470, some twenty years after Gutenberg started mechanically reproducing copies of his Bible in Germany. Prior to that time, the production of books was a labour-intensive process that resulted in individual, not multiple, copies. Technologies developed gradually in the period extending from the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance. The most common material support for written documents in ancient times in the Eastern Mediterranean had been papyrus, typically in the form of scrolls, but it was replaced starting in late antiquity by prepared animal skins, parchment or vellum, and began to be arranged in the format which is still the standard for books, that of the codex. The codex presented a text as separate pages bound together as opposed to the continuous format of the scroll: separate gatherings of folios, known as quires, were stitched together to form the finished book. Advantages of this innovative new format included the ability to use both sides of the page for text and much greater ease of consultation. Though the moves towards parchment and the codex format developed separately, they both seem to have become more or less the norm by the fourth century ce . Paper, a considerably cheaper alternative to parchment, was introduced into Europe in the twelfth century, but only became common in France in the course of the fourteenth century.

The troubadours: the Occitan model

For much of the twentieth century, French literary scholars interpreted the word ‘French’ in ‘medieval French literature’ in the narrowest possible manner – as a linguistic rather than political or geographical marker. Despite the conquest of Occitan lands in the thirteenth century and the gradual incorporation of those lands into the French state in the centuries that followed, the appellation ‘French’ has rarely been applied to the languages or literary texts from the South. Individuals were, of course, understood to belong to the political collective known as France but they retained their local appellations (Gascon, Rouergais, Toulousain, Provencal, etc.). Because they did not write or speak primarily in French, they and their culture were largely excluded from national cultural history. Yet it was already clear in the twelfth century that some portion of the Occitan population was bilingual and certainly by the time of the Ordonnances de Villers-Cotterets (1535), which mandated its use in all legal and judicial documents, French had made significant headway amongst the educated classes in the South. It had also long been used as a lingua franca around the Mediterranean and was written and spoken in dialects that dominated commerce along the major trading routes throughout northern Italy and on to the Levant. Yet in writing the cultural history of France, in producing a coherent post-1789 narrative in which the power and prestige of the French people is said to emerge from this first republican identity, varieties of French, and the regional languages that nourished its early literary production, were conveniently overlooked.

What does ‘Renaissance’ mean?

Occupying geographically and culturally an intermediate space between the Italian Renaissance and the northern Renaissance, France was able to benefit from both of them, to produce its own version of the Renaissance. The humanist Renaissance was more about the recovery of Greek than the rebirth of Latin. Latin had remained the intellectual language of Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages, a lingua franca that allowed an easy interchange between scholars and churchmen wherever they lived. In many ways, Frances Renaissance was unique in Europe. The product of both Italian and northern European, of Catholic and Protestant influences, embracing enthusiastically Hellenism without discarding the Roman tradition, in the first half of the century it benefited from the patronage and enthusiasm of one of Europes more enlightened monarchs.