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14 - Literature in pieces: female sanctity and the relics of early women’s writing

from II - EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Clare A. Lees
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

Credimus autem multo plura quam reperiantur extitisse, que aut ex illius eui torpentium scriptorum negligentia nequaquam litteris mandata fuerunt, aut descripta paganorum rabie ecclesias ac cenobia depopulante inter cetera perierunt.

Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Miracvla sancte Ætheldrethe

[And we believe that there are many more (miracles) than are now to be found, which through the carelessness of the sluggish scribes of that age were never committed to writing, or were recorded but have perished among other things when the fury of the heathen laid waste to churches and monasteries.]

It is the sound of memory at work, creating a necklace of narrative.

Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter, p. 9

Women’s literary historiography

Literary histories of English women’s writing have, traditionally, had little time for the early medieval period. Early medieval women are excluded from teleologies that celebrate the emergence of authorship and literature, understood in specific and restrictive terms, and that only acknowledge certain narrowly defined forms of textual production. They are omitted from linear temporal paradigms that already struggle to accommodate the vernacular visionary writings of the later medieval period and the devout poetry of the Renaissance, but which incorporate far more easily the dramatic texts of the seventeenth century and the prose writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth. One example of such an exclusive literary history is The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, now in its third edition (2007).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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References

Lees, and Overing quote Bennett in the revised preface to the 2009 reissue of Double Agents, p. xiii.
PMLA, 121 (2006)
PMLA, 121 (2006), 838–9.

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