Outdoing the Daughters of Syon?: Edith of Wilton and the Representation of Female Community in Fifteenth-Century England

Abstract

In this themed collection by literary, historical and archaeological scholars, the study of medieval women is confidently and freshly mainstream. Profiting from the development of newly flexible models of gender, literacy, the political, the social, and the domestic, the volume is non-separatist, exploratory both of new source materials and new readings of established sources, and able to consider the broadest implications for the study of medieval culture without simply re-absorbing medieval women into invisibility. Grouped under the headings of matters of reading, of conduct and place, the essays move from legal cases to actual buildings and conceptions of the household, from conduct books to chronicles and romances, from saints’ lives to the medieval unconscious and back again, exemplifying the mature interdisciplinarity of current work on medieval women.