Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

Abstract

Over the last three decades medieval women's writing has become a significant focus of scholarly research. Women's literary culture in England in the late Middle Ages and the influence of Continental European women writers in Britain have been painstakingly charted. Simultaneously, the working practices of Chaucer, his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, along with their relationships with scribes, patrons, and audiences, have been subject to close and necessary scrutiny, as has the European context of Chaucer's work. Yet, while there have been numerous studies of women or gender in the work of Chaucer and his contemporaries, research on women's writing has, to a significant extent, existed in parallel with research on Chaucerian literature. The established “canon” of medieval English literature has remained fundamentally unchallenged by the emergence of scholarship on medieval women's writing. In order to ameliorate this dichotomy of criticism, this special issue of The Chaucer Review brings together essays by scholars who work both on canonical medieval writers, such as Chaucer, the Pearl poet, and Hoccleve, and on women's literary culture in England and Europe.Our main objective in lessening the divide between so-called “female” and “male” literary traditions in the period is to up-end the idea that these apparently different and separate literary cultures constitute a hierarchical binary—and that most women's writing needs to be seen as noncanonical. Here we interrogate what the male tradition shares with—and owes to—the female tradition. At the same time, we do not argue for an end to the idea, now well established, that there is a distinctive female literary tradition in the late Middle Ages. Rather, the essays in this issue seek to demonstrate that Chaucer and other male authors have much in common with women's literary culture.Before discussing the methodologies and principles that underpin the essays in this issue, it is helpful to tease out the difference between the terms tradition and canon as used in literary histories and criticism. The literary term canon is a relative neologism, first appearing in North American contexts in 1929 but not finding its way into the Oxford English Dictionary until 2002. There it is defined as A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study; those works of esp. Western literature considered to be established as being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics.1 As Liedeke Plate has pointed out, such a definition not only posits the canon as something equating to cultural memory, but also suggests that the canon “embodies the values of dominant social groups,”2 with these groups, until very recently, having been almost entirely male. Thus, the notion of a canon has played into the hands of a political teleology that has concertedly forgotten women's contribution to literary culture.Plate's conception of the relation between memory and the canon resonates clearly with the questions raised by Virginia Woolf in her essay of 1940, “The Leaning Tower,” in which she queries why Western culture insists upon “the belief that there is some force, influence, outer pressure which is strong enough to stamp itself upon a whole group of different writers so that all their writing has a certain common likeness.”3 Woolf uses the phallic metaphor of the tower to pinpoint a literary genealogy that has worked, like patrilineage, to ensure that “Books descend from books as families descend from families.”4 Here Woolf anticipates by some thirty years Michel Foucault's identification of the incestuous interdependence between the literary canon and a culture's sense of literary tradition, which renders often very diverse works “both successive and identical … making it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same.”5 Such a process has served to obscure the ways in which literary production is always multifaceted, inherently nonlinear, and, as Woolf had argued forty years previously, far more like “a spider's web … attached to life at all four corners.”6 As such, literary production is anything but successive and identical, spreading out across peoples and their cultures in organic and ultimately unpredictable ways.The idea of the canon, therefore, along with male literary genealogy (the tradition it serves to reify) leaves much of the labyrinth of literary history overlooked or unremembered, dictating what is worthy of remembrance and what is not. And, while the recuperation of women's literary traditions in recent decades remains central to the feminist project—and to the conception of this issue—the key concerns are not just whether women's literary production is remembered but also the way in which it is remembered. As Woolf reminds us, rather than being “single and solitary births,” great works are produced by means of “thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”7 A revisiting of the works of the late Middle Ages with “the body of the people” firmly in mind can reap rich dividends in uncovering the frequently central role played by women in late medieval literary culture.The term women's literary culture is here defined broadly, then, to include not only women's writing but also women's roles as patrons, readers, and subjects of texts. The essays in this issue discuss the contexts of the work of Chaucer and his contemporaries, predecessors, and successors in order to demonstrate the importance of keeping in view women's engagement with literature. A range of methodologies have been adopted, including: close comparative readings of literary texts by male and female authors; examinations of gender in relation to genre, literary influence, and literary reception; constructions of readers and reading; and explorations of the influence of patrons and textual anonymity. They also include empirical research and archival research, including analyses of manuscripts that focus on female ownership, production, readership, and reception. Taken together, the essays address a range of questions. What evidence is there to support the premise that women's literary activities influenced Chaucer and his male contemporaries? Do the ways in which Chaucer and his contemporaries position their work, and in which women writers position theirs, ever overlap? Are genres handled differently in male- and female-authored texts? Does a patron's gender significantly impact the genre or content of a text? What can we discover about the reception and transmission of works by women, or of works by Chaucer and his male contemporaries, by communities of female readers? The ultimate aim of this issue is to consider how examining the nuanced intersections of gender and textual production might enhance our understanding of late medieval English literature as a whole.Recent research has shown that women's relationships to literary production were often collaborative. This finding proves to be a useful paradigm for thinking about medieval writing more generally—whether by women, by men, or by both.8 Women could be—and very often were—the shapers of texts written specifically for them. The thirteenth-century guide for anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse, was originally written for three female recluses, but it was soon adapted by an anonymous author for many more who lived together in communities, eventually becoming a paradigm for the literary concept of mouvance as the text was rewritten, adapted, and excerpted for different types of audiences—male and female, religious and lay—well into the sixteenth century.9 To think of this text as belonging to any single group or tradition is to ignore its rich history and the multiplicity of its range and influence. Indeed, to examine it as a “female” text in isolation is ultimately to ignore a large portion of its extensive (his)story.The same can also be said about the recent charting of Continental women writers and their influence on women's literary culture in England. Scholars such as Susan Dickman, Janet Dillon, Lynn Staley, David Wallace, and Jonathan Hsy have traced the influence of Continental holy women's writing on Margery Kempe, for example,10 while Rosalynn Voaden has done much to reveal the literary work of visionary nuns at Helfta in northern Germany and other European areas.11 Looking toward the Netherlands, Anneke Mulder-Bakker has cogently demonstrated the centrality of women's literary culture to the context of the Devotio moderna, a movement that attracted the lettered scholastic as much as it did the unlettered laywoman.12 While not arguing specifically for the interweaving of male and female traditions of devotion, Mulder-Bakker's conception of “communities of discourse” involving both men and women, as well as the texts they produced, has provided a template for the type of interrogation we are positing here.13Alongside an interest in the collaborative literariness of medieval women, canonical writers like Chaucer continue to occupy the attention of scholars. The work of Langland, Gower, Lydgate, and Hoccleve has for centuries been treated as a literary circle that defines the English canon of medieval literature. Closely associated with this male group are the English mystics: Walter Hilton, the Cloud of Unknowing author, Richard Rolle, and (occasionally) Julian of Norwich. Until recently, the figure of Margery Kempe was often excluded, and while there has been interest in the extent of the influence of male-authored texts on Julian and Kempe, the reverse has yet to be widely considered. To a large extent, the concept of separate male and female literary traditions, conceptualized in part through proactive feminist intervention, has remained intact, with investigations into male and female authorship running in parallel.Thus, while we have gained substantial insights into the role of women in medieval literary culture, the traditional canon has remained fundamentally unchallenged. The roles played by women and their influence on all kinds of late medieval English literary production have largely continued to occupy the margins, with the central spotlight focused on their male contemporaries. This special issue of The Chaucer Review addresses the dichotomy by considering what an understanding of women's literary culture can contribute to our knowledge of literary history in Chaucer's time. Our hope is to encourage an inclusive approach to the nuanced intersections of gender and textual production during the period.Each of the six essays included in this volume identifies intersections between the traditions within which the men have been positioned and those within which medieval women writers position themselves. In the first essay, Corinne Saunders explores the proposition that notions of mind, body, and affect shape the presentation of the individual female psyche and, hence, the affective engagement of the reader or audience, especially in relation to Chaucer's romance writing. Constructions of the mind in the medieval period were fundamentally different from those of the modern period, though no less complex. The mind (which can blur with the soul) was viewed as made up of competing factors: will, reason, conscience, desire, instinct, emotion. These attributes combined with medieval assumptions about gender—in particular, with notions of female embodiment and female susceptibility to affect.How the female body shapes, in its absence or loss, the textual practice of two male authors forms the subject of Diane Watt's essay. She examines the resonances between Goscelin of St. Bertin's Latin Liber confortatorius, written in 1080 for Eve of Wilton, and the Middle English Pearl. She argues for Goscelin's text being seen as a consolatory text that anticipates Pearl. Both texts focus on the troubling, deeply ambiguous relationship between an adult man stricken with grief at his permanent loss of an idealized young virgin. Both present the spirit of a woman reanimated, who brings—from the real or figurative afterlife—consolation and spiritual guidance to the distraught writer. Watt makes a case for Pearl being read, like Goscelin's text, in terms of the anchoritic tradition.Amy Appleford's essay opens with another restless male narrator—that of Hoccleve's Complaint—a man tormented by sickness and social isolation whose identification with the biblical Job is quickly established. Likening this introit to that of Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love, Appleford argues that these two opening evocations signal a preoccupation on the part of both writers with the value of human suffering. Patient endurance and ascetic mortification are intrinsic to the penitentiary ethics of each text. Appleford concludes that Julian and Hoccleve were working within a shared—although characteristically different—fifteenth-century understanding of suffering as a mark of divine favor rather than human sinfulness.Liz Herbert McAvoy focuses on the writing of the thirteenth-century German visionary Mechtild of Hackeborn, in both its original Latin and fifteenth-century Middle English translation. McAvoy locates Mechtild's treatment of heaven, hell, and purgatory within eschatological visionary writing, a genre adopted by both men and women, lay and religious. Most scholarly treatments to date have considered women's efforts to be adaptations of a male genre stretching from Gregory the Great to Dante. McAvoy posits, instead, the existence of an intergender dialogue between male and female writers, tracing Mechtild's work, in particular, to the heart of late medieval English devotional writings aimed at both sexes.If the reading of devotional texts among the laity had become commonplace by the fifteenth century, Nancy Bradley Warren's essay examines the ownership by the nuns of Syon Abbey and Amesbury of manuscripts containing works by Chaucer, Lydgate, and Hoccleve. Warren points out that the phenomenon of late medieval and early modern English nuns reading fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts suggests a more secular spectrum of reading than would normally be expected, and she points toward an engagement among women religious with ideas concerning proper political and religious conduct.The concluding essay by Marea Mitchell examines the nineteenth-century preoccupation with medieval literary culture and Virginia Woolf's response to it in the twentieth century. In The Common Reader and the short story “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” Woolf uses medieval texts as a lens for examining notions of Englishness devoid of nationalism. For Woolf, English literary culture is a contested space that needs to embrace writers and ideas outside the masculinist tradition. Building upon a constructed, nostalgic medievalism created by late-nineteenth-century scholars, Woolf ultimately allied it to twentieth-century modernist concerns, and also to a breaking-down of the artificial barriers between past-versus-present, male-versus-female traditions of literary activity.Taken together, the essays in this special issue on Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing demonstrate that medieval women's engagement in literary culture was crucial to the full emergence of the English literary tradition.