The History of British Women’s Writing, Volume 1: 700–1500 ed. by Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt (review)

Volume 1 of Palgrave Macmillan’s series on the History of British Women’s Writing, covering the period 700–1500, is both challenging and exciting, historically grounded and theoretically sophisticated. The editors note early in their introduction that the medieval period presents particular challenges for the writers of such a history: not only must they “confront and . . . rethink many deeply ingrained assumptions about women’s writing,” but “medieval understandings of authorship, literature, and national identity, and the contexts and processes of writing and textual circulation were quite distinct from later periods” (1). To address the first of these problems the editors and authors in this collection focus on the concept of women’s agency in the Middle Ages, not only as authors but also as scribes, translators, patrons, and readers who affect the ways in which literature is produced. The second problem is more complex: as Catherine Clarke points out in her essay, even the very notion of “Britishness” is open to question in this period. For these and other reasons, this book takes pains to show that literary history is inextricably intertwined with cultural history and that the history of the material artifact is as important as the intellectual history of the time.

These theoretical positions provide a solid foundation upon which the volume’s twenty-three articles, collectively and individually, can build. Such coherence does not prevent the voices of the individual contributors being heard loud and clear. Some articles provide entirely new arguments; others explore new developments in previous research; still others summarize important current research and suggest new directions for further study.

The book is carefully and critically organized. The first section, “Pre-Texts and Contexts,” provides “an essential historical, linguistic, and cultural background to the history of British women’s writing in the medieval period” (9). The articles address women and Old English literature, literature before and after the Conquest, French and Welsh literature, and medieval antifeminism. But this section is also much more than “mere” context; as the editors point out, “the risk of taking a contextual approach to women’s literary history is that it can seem to relegate certain texts, and groups of texts, and indeed periods of history to the category of background” (9). Instead the editors insist that the chapters in this section provide a bigger picture of women’s writing and play a significant part in determining its history. The term “pre-text” informs and contextualizes not only a text, but women’s literary history per se through providing literary, historical, linguistic, or biographical material.

In the second part, “Bodies, Behaviors, Texts,” the articles focus on genres of medieval literature in which women were active participants: romance, saints’ lives, devotional literature, Marian literature, and conduct books. Recognizing the medieval fear of and antipathy toward the female body, the authors “explore the role played by bodies and the behaviours they generate, both prescribed and proscribed, within female literary production” (13). The texts examined are authored by both men and women although they are all closely associated with women either as authors, patrons, or readers. The articles in this section reveal collaborative practices of production where authors are extensively engaged with topics relevant to women’s interests and women’s concerns: interests and concerns that helped shape the genres themselves. “Clearly,” the editors conclude, “many medieval women were fully cognizant of the disjunction between discourse and practice, between ideologically obedient reading and creative response and how both bodies and behaviors could be usefully manipulated in the service of literary production and its cultures” (17).

The third section, “Literacies and Literary Cultures,” focuses on the range of women’s literary activities such as “women and manuscript production, circulation and ownership; women’s literary and religious networks; women’s literacy and education; women as readers, as translators, and as letter-writers; and the question of anonymous...