Overview

Essays on women and devotional literature in the Middle Ages in commemoration and celebration of the respected feminist scholar Catherine Innes-Parker. Silence was a much-lauded concept in the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of religious literature directed at women. Based on the Pauline prescription that women should neither preach nor teach, and should at all times keep speech to a minimum, the concept of silence lay at the forefront of many devotional texts, particularly those associated with various forms of women's religious enclosure. Following the example of the Virgin Mary, religious women were exhorted to speak seldom, and then only seriously and devoutly. However, as this volume shows, such gendered exhortations to silence were often more rhetorical than literal. The contributions range widely: they consider the English 'Wooing Group' texts and female-authored visionary writings from the Saxon nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century; works by Richard Rolle and the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec in the fourteenth century; Anglo-French treatises, and books housed in the library of the English noblewoman Cecily Neville in the fifteenth century; and the resonant poetics of women from non-Christian cultures. But all demonstrate the ways in which silence, rather than being a mere absence of speech, frequently comprised a form of gendered articulation and proto-feminist point of resistance. They thus provide an apt commemoration and celebration of the deeply innovative work of Catherine Innes-Parker (1956-2019), the respected feminist scholar and a pioneer of this important field of study.

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9781843846628

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CATE GUNN is an independent scholar who has written on thirteenth-century anchoritic and pastoral literature. LIZ HERBERT MCAVOY FLSW is Professor Emerita of Medieval Literature at Swansea University and Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol. NAOË KUKITA YOSHIKAWA is Professor Emerita of Medieval English Literature at Shizuoka University, and Research Fellow at the Center for Medieval English Literary Text Studies, Meiji University, Japan. JENNIFER N. BROWN is Professor of English and World Literatures at Marymount Manhattan College. KATHRYN KERBY-FULTON is Professor Emerita, University of Notre Dame. ANNIE SUTHERLAND is Associate Professor, University of Oxford, and Tutorial Fellow in Old and Middle English, Somerville College. NICHOLAS WATSON teaches English at Harvard University. His research focuses on medieval English and North European literature, intellectual history, visionary writing and the role of the written vernacular.

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