Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-342) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Medieval Women's Literary Cultures and Thinking Beyond the Local / Liz Herbert McAvoy and Sue Niebrzydowski -- Part 1: Comparison and Dialogue. 1. Speaking Across the Stars: Parallel Affective Communities in Islamic and Christian Hagiography / Ayoush Lazikani -- 2. Women's Mystical Friendships: Margery Kempe and Mirabai / Alexandra Verini -- 3. Women's Writing in the Japanese Heian Period: A Medieval Dialogue between the East and West / Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa -- Part 2: Constructing Gender and Genre. 4. The Genre of the Late Medieval Personalised Orthodox Slavic Women's Miscellany: Three 'Existential' Questions / Michel de Dobbeleer -- 5. The Role of Kisaeng Sijo Poets in Medieval Korean Literature / Ko Jeong-hee and Justin M. Byron-Davies -- 6. Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya: Gender, Authority and Paradox in Attar's Tadhkirat al-'awliya and the Mantiq al-tayr / Shazia Jagot -- 7. Deception, Infanticide, and the Making of a Female Saint: A Look at the Gädl Krəstos Śämra / Meron T. Gebreananaye -- Part 3: Saintly Performance and Marian Piety. 8. 'Of our Lady thassumpcion': A European Context for the Worshipful Wives of Chester and their Marian Play / Sue Niebrzydowski -- 9. Mary and Elizabeth: Male Perspectives of Female-Coded Piety in Offices for the Visitation / Rhianydd Hallas -- 10. Speaking Internationally in Female Communities on the Eastern Borders of Medieval Europe / Renáta Modráková -- 11. Textual Phantoms and Spectral Presences: The Coming to Rest of Mechthild of Hackeborn's Writing in the Late Middle Ages / Liz Herbert McAvoy -- 12. Negotiating the Abject and the Sublime: The Centrality of Discourse Communities within Women's Mystical Experience / Kathryn Loveridge -- Part 4: Evidence and the Archives: Revisiting and Reconsidering. 13. 'Ic þæt secgan mæg': Women, Song, Story, Presence / Elaine Treharne -- 14. In the Undergrowth: Llwyn a Pherth and Sexual Deviancy in Medieval Wales / Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Sara Elin Roberts -- 15. 'I shall send yw money to by such stufe as I wull haue': The Paston Shoppers / Vicki Kay Price -- Afterword: Intersectionality and Coalitions / Jonathan Hsy.
Summary:
"Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, medieval women's writing has been the subject of energetic conversation and debate. This interest, however, has focused predominantly on western European writers working within the Christian tradition: the Saxon visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, for example, and, in England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are cases in point. While this present book acknowledges the huge importance of such writers to women's literary history, it also argues that they should no longer be read solely within a local context. Instead, by putting them into conversation with other literary women and their cultures from wider geographical regions and global cultures - women from eastern Europe and their books, dramas and music; the Welsh gwraig llwyn a pherth (woman of bush and brake); the Indian mystic, Mirabai; Japanese women writers from the Heian period; women saints from across Christian Europe and those of eleventh-century Islam or late medieval Ethiopia; for instance - much more is to be gained in terms of our understanding of the drivers behind and expressions of medieval women's literary activities in far broader contexts. This volume considers the dialogue, synergies, contracts and resonances emerging from such new alignments, and to help a wider, multidirectional development of this enquiry into women's literary cultures"-- Page 4 of cover.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.