Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing Reading the Book of Life

by Mulder-Bakker, Anneke B.

• ISBN13: 9780230602878
• ISBN10: 0230602878
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

By tracing the theme through different texts and genres, contributors uncover the fabric of experience woven into the writings by, for, and about women. They discover distinct and informal "communities of discourse" and study the learning, reading, and writing practices which women enjoyed. By showing how such practices ran both parallel to, but also often incorporated, traditional, male-focused learning activity this volume advances the "new" genre of "the book of life" and makes a compelling case for a new reading of medieval texts.

Author Biography

Anneke Mulder-Bakker is Emerita at the University of Leiden and previously taught Medieval History and Medieval Studies at the University of Groningen. She is the author of Sanctity and Motherhood; The Invention of Saintliness; The Prime of Their Lives: Wise Old Women in Pre-Industrial Europe (together with Renée Nip) and Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe.

Liz Herbert McAvoy is Senior Lecturer in Gender in English Studies and Medieval Literature at Swansea University. She is the author of Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe; Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs; and A Companion to Julian of Norwich. She is currently working on a monograph which examines the intersections of gender and space within texts written by, for, and about medieval anchorites.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
List of Abbreviations	p. xiii
Experientia and the Construction of Experience in Medieval Writing: An Introduction	p. 1
The New Devout and their Women of Authority	p. 25
Partners in Profession: Inwardness, Experience, and Understanding in Heloise and Abelard	p. 47
Communities of Discourse: Religious Authority and the Role of Holy Women in the Later Middle Ages	p. 65
Two Women of Experience, Two Men of Letters, and the Book of Life	p. 83
"[A]n awngel al clothyd in white": Rereading the Book of Life as The Book of Margery Kempe	p. 103
Die Cheestelicke Melody: A Program for the Spiritual Life in a Middle Dutch Song Cycle	p. 123
Handing on Wisdom and Knowledge in Hadewijch of Brabant's Book of Visions	p. 149
Afterword	p. 169
Notes on Contributors	p. 177
General Index	p. 179
Index of Modern Authors	p. 191
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