Introduction

Most medievalists working on English literature would now consider Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich "canonical." These two visionaries' rise in modern popularity, both in research and in teaching, shows the impact of the last five decades or so of groundbreaking work on women and their diverse roles in medieval English literature. Some scholars might think the surge in feminist scholarship and the canon wars of the eighties and nineties to be done, over, old news. Others would disagree. In fact, beyond these two figures, much of the rest of scholarly exploration on women's literary culture, especially women and religious writing, doesn't actually seem to have had the same radical effect on mainstream views of what we should read and how we should read—i.e., the canon and canonical reading practices. Why is this? What is still at stake, so many years later, in continuing the push to decentralize the canon away from male, secular writers? What more is there to learn about how "the other half" of the population shaped medieval literature, and why should we care?

These questions, and this colloquium, arise from the work of the international network on "Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval English Canon," which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2015 to 2017. The network partners met together formally at three events held at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, UK in 2015, Boston University in the USA in 2016, and the University of Bergen in Norway in 2017. The essays included in this colloquium emerged out of the conversations that took place in these meetings, which sought to explore how an understanding of women's literary culture, seen here to include women's roles as writers, patrons, readers, and subjects of texts, can contribute to our understanding of late medieval literature as a whole.¹

The essays here, which focus primarily on works produced in late medieval England, complicate the assumption that women's literary history represents a tradition that is distinct from that of men.² They demonstrate the importance of considering women's engagement with literature when reading the established medieval English canon as it is defined today,³ while at the same time they question the historical validity of the modern literary canon. When we recognize the varied contributions of women, our conception of canonical medieval literature shifts to be more accurate and more historically informed. An understanding of the interconnection of gender and genre is vital to this process. Put simply, shifting the focus onto women's engagement with literary texts renders different forms and genres canonical. At the same time, by paying particular attention to late medieval salvific devotional and exemplary literature, including texts written by or for women, the essays in this colloquium also reflect on the contexts of the work of Chaucer and his contemporaries.

In many ways, canon cannot be extricated from gender and genre. From its earliest history the idea of the canon as used in a secular, literary sense (as opposed to its origins in sacred texts) has been deeply connected to gender, inasmuch as the canon began as a vehicle for male fantasy. The eighteenth-century German scholar David Ruhnken first employed the word "canon" to describe alleged teaching lists of the rhetorical genre created by second-century Greek Alexandrian teachers such as Aristophanes; as Runhken claimed, "from the great abundance of orators … they drew up into a canon at least ten they thought most important."⁴ Jan Gorak, in his book Making of the Modern Canon, explains how, "after the publication of Ruhnken's book, it became common, if sometimes controversial, to extend the application of canon to any list of valuable inherited works."⁵ Yet the list was a complete fabrication—no such neatly numbered canon has survived from the classical period.⁶ The persistent appeal of the "best-of" canon, however, indelibly changed how literature was organized and controlled over the centuries that followed. Ruhnken's influence exposes the ways in which scholarly attempts to project a canonical hierarchy on literature of the past more accurately reflect modern desires for...