The History of British Women's Writing, 700-1500

This volume, now available in paperback for the first time, focuses on women's literary history in Britain between 700 and 1500, a period traditionally marginalized in accounts of women's writing in English. Such marginalization, the editors argue, has been brought about in part by the erroneous assumption that there were no women writers in Britain before the emergence of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The History of British Women's Writing Volume 1: 700-1500 vigorously refutes this premise by exploring a wide range of texts written by, for, and in collaboration with women from the Anglo-Saxon period through to the beginning of the sixteenth century.

By also considering women's writing in the context of the deeply multicultural and multilingual milieu which was medieval 'Britain' it uncovers a wide range of literary activity undertaken in Latin, Welsh, and French, as well as in the English vernacular, and, in so doing, it demands a rethinking of the long-established traditions of 'English' literary history, and even of the concept of 'writing' itself.

Liz Herbert McAvoy is Professor of Gender in English Studies and Medieval Literature at Swansea University, UK, where she also directs The Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research. She has published widely in the area of medieval women's writing and has recently published a book on gender, space and medieval anchoritic enclosure.

Diane Watt is Professor of English Literature at the University of Surrey, UK. She has published widely in medieval literature and culture and her book publications include Medieval Women's Writing (2007) and The Lesbian Premodern, co-edited with Noreen Giffney and Michelle Sauer (2011).