Larrington - Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: a Sourcebook

Thanks are owed to very many people who have contributed ideas, suggested texts, discussed the difficulties of reading medieval literary texts and their relation to history. John Blair, Katy Cubitt, Julia Smith and Frdrique Lachaud have all shown the historians tolerance for the bizarre questions asked by someone trained in a different discipline. John and Sarah Blair, Suzanne Bobzien and Frdrique Lachaud have also been of great assistance in the pursuit of illustrations, while Ivona Ilic and Oliver Gutman have kindly provided translations.

A great debt of gratitude is owed to St Johns College, Oxford which has supported me throughout this project and granted me valuable writing time in the form of a sabbatical term in Michaelmas 1993. Thanks are due to all at the Gender and Medieval Studies Conference in Leeds in January 1994, in particular Mark Chinca, Simon Gaunt, Jane Taylor, Ivona Ilic, Ruth Evans, Rosalynn Voaden and Lesley Johnson.

Talia Rodgers at Routledge, and Tricia Dever, her indefatigable assistant, have made the process of publication extraordinarily painless. Sarah-Jane Woolley was a wonderfully efficient Desk Editor. Maureen Pemberton at the Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library gave generously of her time and enthusiasm in finding illustrations. San Williams indexed with her usual enthusiasm.

The students of the Advanced Studies in England Program in Bathespecially Hue Le, Annette Thompson and Sarah Thumm, the first guineapigs on whom this book was testedhave been enthusiastic and inventive in their responses, and I thank all of them for the suggestions, reactions and ideas which they have contributed during the Women in Pre-Renaissance Europe courses. Thanks are due also to Don Nunes and Barbara White of ASE for their encouragement in the development of the course.

And thanks to John Davis, as usual, for everything.

The author and publishers gratefully acknowledge permission from the following to quote from copyright material: Elspeth Benton and the Medieval Academy of America for material from J.F.Benton, Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent, Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching, published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 1984; Boydell and Brewer Ltd for Aldhelm, The Prose Works, transl. M.Lapidge and M.Herren, Cambridge, D.S.Brewer, 1989, Saxo Grammaticus, A History of the Danish People, transl. P.Fisher and H.Ellis-Davidson, Woodbridge, Suffolk, Boydell Press, 1980 and J.Jesch, Women in the Viking Age, Woodbridge, Suffolk, Boydell Press, 1991; Professor Peter Dronke for Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love Lyric, Oxford University Press, 2nd edn 1968; Professor Peter Dronke and Cambridge University Press for extracts from Women Writers of the Middle Ages, 1984; The Council of the Early English Text Society for material from The Book of the Tour Landry, EETS SS 2, and The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS OS 212; Everymans Library Ltd for William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text,