Liz Herbert McAvoy

“Flourish Like a Garden”: Pain, Purgatory, and Salvation in the Writing of Medieval Religious Women

n the fifteenth-century female-authored text entitled A Revelation of Purgatory, its author, a Winchester recluse, describes a series of dream visions of a now-dead friend of hers named Margaret. 2 Margaret is a former nun, most likely of the nearby convent of Nunnaminster, who reveals to her friend in graphic detail the multifarious pains of Purgatory and her own torturous route towards the golden gates of Paradise. Her reason for appearing to the visionary is not only to seek her help to alleviate her pains, but also to mobilize a group of influential churchmen, part of the visionary’s own spiritual community, to say prayers on her behalf. 3 Along with the souls of myriad other men and women, both religious and lay, Margaret suffers the most unspeakable torments for her former sins of pride, worldliness, and failure to undertake a promised

The Medieval hortus conclusus: Revisiting the Pleasure Garden

he four essays presented in this special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum examine some of the multifarious functions and meanings of the prominent literary figura of the hortus conclusus in the high to late Middle Ages. Tracing its origins from biblical sources, such as Genesis and the Song of Songs, and their intersections with classical and Persian traditions, these essays focus upon the walled garden’s deployment in both canonical and lesser-known literary texts, arguing for far more complex meanings attached to the medieval enclosed garden than have generally been considered in a single volume. 1 As simultaneously physical, spiritual, symbolic, curative, and restorative—and, iconographically, frequently housing Christ, the Virgin, or the “Lady” of medieval romance—the walled garden’s multilayered association with a heady mix of female spirituality, sexuality, and women’s curative medicine has remained largely underexplored. 2 These four essays therefore

Uncovering the ‘saintly Anchoress’: myths of Medieval anchoritism and the reclusion of Katharine de Audley

This article uncovers the lost history of the early fourteenth-century religious recluse, Katharine de Audley, a woman whose life came to be both distorted and romanticised by legend and literary adaptation in the centuries that followed. Tracing first the various literary treatments of Katharine as medieval anchorite, and second, her lived history as it emerges from the records, and by placing both within the historical and ideological context of medieval anchoritism, the author argues for the female anchorite as forming part of a critical practice which continued to address socio-religious and personal needs both in her own day and long after she and her vocation had fallen from immediate cultural consciousness.

Writing a History of British Women’sWriting from 700 to 1500

How can a history of British women’swriting be written? Such a project must necessarily be collaborative if it is to attempt to be comprehensive, but even then any claim to comprehensiveness has to be qualified: paradoxically the more expansive the history, the more partial it will be. The challenges of writing such a history are perhaps even greater for scholars working in the early periods because we are forced to confront and to rethink many deeply ingrained assumptions about women’swriting. This volume focuses on a period of literary history that is often marginalized in accounts of women’swriting in English: the Middle Ages. It is a widely accepted view that there are only two women writers in English in the period before 1500, and therefore there is little to be said for an age (or ages) when women writers were so much an exception. Furthermore, the two medieval English women writers whose names are widely known, Julian of Norwich (1342/3–after 1416) and Margery Kempe (c. 1373–after 1439), did not think of themselves as writers or authors. Nor were they responsible for literature as it is thought of today — they did not compose poetry, or romances, or fiction of any sort. Even these two ‘named’ women writers do not comfortably fit established evolutionary models of women’sliterary history over the longue duree, with their emphases on the spread of literacy, the bias towards print culture, and the emergence of the woman poet, and ultimately of the professional author of drama or fiction.1