There is much to be gleaned on the topic of women writers of the Middle Ages simply from the existence of such an entry in a literary history. The reader will note immediately that there is no parallel article on male authors, a category so big as to be unthinkable as a single unit. On the one hand, it is reasonable to assume that the topic of women authors is small and circumscribed enough to fit comfortably into relatively few words. On the other hand, however, the inclusion of such an article implies that even if limited in scope, the topic is important enough in our current understanding of the Middle Ages to merit its own discussion.

We can never know how many of the anonymous authors of the Middle Ages might, in fact, have been ‘anonyma’. All we know for certain is that the list of women authors of that era to whom we can reliably attach a name, a biography, and a list of works is very small indeed. The spectrum broadens somewhat when we consider women authors of lyric poetry whose names we do not know, poetry written in a woman's voice that may or may not be authored by women, and the existence of women authors in the fictional realm, all of which we will consider briefly here.

Whether for fictional or historically verifiable women authors, the sine qua non for participation in literary culture was access to education and to the necessary means of production.