Women’s Contributions to Middle English Arthurian Scholarship

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the history of scholarship of both Middle English Arthurian literature and its afterlives to argue that the marginalisation of such literature has slowly diminished – often through the work of women. The increasing numbers of women in academia coincided with the advent of new methodologies in literary studies in the late-twentieth century to produce a wide range of scholarship on English Arthurian literature, including on texts that had long been considered beneath serious study. This work continues now, with recent studies considering English Arthuriana through postcolonial theory, queer theory, affect theory, adaptation studies and many other methods.