The writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe show an awareness of traditional and contemporary attitudes towards women, in particular medieval attitudes towards the female body. This study examines the extent to which they make use of such attitudes in their writing, and investigates the importance of the female body as a means of explaining their mystical experiences and the insight gained from them; in both writers, the female body is central to their writing, leading to a feminised language through which they achieve authority and create a space in which they can be heard,...

This volume, now available in paperback for the first time, focuses on women's literary history in Britain between 700 and 1500, a period traditionally marginalized in accounts of women's writing in English. Such marginalization, the editors argue, has been brought about in part by the erroneous assumption that there were no women writers in Britain before the emergence of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The History of British Women's Writing Volume 1: 700-1500 vigorously refutes this premise by exploring a wide range of texts written by, for,...