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Chapter 22 - Beyond Borders

Women Poets in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales up to c. 1500

from V - Women as Authors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2023

Corinne Saunders
Affiliation:
Durham University
Diane Watt
Affiliation:
University of Surrey
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Summary

This essay addresses three fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century women writers who composed erotic and satiric verse: the Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain, and the Scottish Gaelic poets, Iseabal Campbell, Countess of Argyll, and her daughter, Iseabal Ní Mheic Cailéan. Adopting an archipelagic feminist approach, Charnell-White locates these figures within the broader context of late medieval bardic culture in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, emphasising their high social status and family connections. While the poetry of Gwerful Mechain was highly regarded in her own time and a significant body of her work remains, far fewer poems by Iseabal Campbell and Iseabal Ni Mheic Cailéan survive; like Mechainߣs, however, they were written to be performed before specific audiences. The essay reads the poetry of all three as playfully reappropriating and subverting the formulaic misogynism typical of the male-authored verse in their bardic or coterie groups. In responding to the kind of anti-feminist motifs characteristic of the European tradition of the querelle des femmes, these poets challenge courtly ideals of women as chaste, silent, and obedient and present female sexuality in empowering terms.

Type
Chapter
Information
Women and Medieval Literary Culture
From the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century
, pp. 457 - 477
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Charnell-White, Cathryn A. (2017). Problems of Authorship and Attribution: The Welsh-Language Women’s Canon Before 1800. Women’s Writing 24.4, 398417. doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2016.1268336.Google Scholar
Gillies, William (1977). Courtly and Satiric Poems in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. Scottish Studies 21, 3553.Google Scholar
Gillies, William (2007). Gaelic Literature in the Later Middle Ages: The Book of the Dean and Beyond. In The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature: From Columba to the Union (1707), ed. Clancy, Thomas O. and Pittock, Murray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 219–25.Google Scholar
Gillies, William (2016). The dánta grá and the Book of the Dean of Lismore. In Ollam: Studies in Gaelic and Related Traditions in Honor of Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, ed. Boyd, Matthieu (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), 257–69.Google Scholar
Lloyd-Morgan, Ceridwen (1991). Oral Composition and Written Transmission: Welsh Women’s Poetry from the Middle Ages and Beyond. Trivium 26, 87102.Google Scholar
MacGregor, Martin (2006). The View from Fortingall: The Worlds of the Book of the Dean of Lismore. Scottish Gaelic Studies 22, 3585.Google Scholar
Powell, Nia M. W. (2000). Women and Strict-Metre Poetry in Wales. In Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales, ed. Roberts, Michael and Clarke, Simone (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 129–58.Google Scholar
Prescott, Sarah, gen. ed. (in production). Women’s Poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales: An Anthology 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Prescott, Sarah (2016). Archipelagic Literary History: Eighteenth-Century Poetry from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In Women’s Writing, 1660–1830: Feminisms and Futures, ed. Batchelor, Jennie and Dow, Gillian (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 179201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stiùbhart, Domhnall Uilleam (1999). Women and Gender in the Early Modern Western Gaidhealtachd. In Women in Scotland: c.1100–c.1750, ed. Ewen, Elizabeth and Meikle, Maureen M. (East Linton: Tuckwell Press), 233–49.Google Scholar

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