Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages

Kathryn Loveridge was awarded her doctorate from Swansea University in 2021. Her research focuses on notions of gender and flesh, and, in particular, on the transgressive potential of Christ's body in late medieval Christianity, as manifested in non-canonical or overlooked texts. LIZ HERBERT MCAVOY FLSW is Professor Emerita of Medieval Literature at Swansea University and Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol. Sue Niebrzydowski is Professor in Medieval Literature at Bangor University. She has published widely in the areas of medieval women's writing and gender and devotion. Vicki Kay Price was awarded her PhD by Bangor University, Wales, in 2021. Her research focuses on the appropriation of mercantile practice and language in late medieval and early modern women's writing, including their letters, life-writing, accounts, and wills - in particular, pre-modern women's involvement with business and money, and their use of financial and commercial language to record lived experience. LIZ HERBERT MCAVOY FLSW is Professor Emerita of Medieval Literature at Swansea University and Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol. Vicki Kay Price was awarded her PhD by Bangor University, Wales, in 2021. Her research focuses on the appropriation of mercantile practice and language in late medieval and early modern women's writing, including their letters, life-writing, accounts, and wills - in particular, pre-modern women's involvement with business and money, and their use of financial and commercial language to record lived experience. 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. Kathryn Loveridge was awarded her doctorate from Swansea University in 2021. Her research focuses on notions of gender and flesh, and, in particular, on the transgressive potential of Christ's body in late medieval Christianity, as manifested in non-canonical or overlooked texts. Sue Niebrzydowski is Professor in Medieval Literature at Bangor University. She has published widely in the areas of medieval women's writing and gender and devotion. Sara Elin Roberts is a historian specialising in the law, literature and culture of Wales and the March from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. She has been working on medieval Welsh lawbooks for more than two decades. Professor Diane Watt is Head of the School of English and Languages, University of Surrey. Secretaries of God won the 1998 Foster Watson Memorial Gift.

Foreword
Diane Watt
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

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
List of Contributors
Bibliography