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1 results

  • Chapter 13 - Tears, Mediation, and Literary Entanglement

  • from IV - Genre and Gender
  • Edited by Corinne Saunders, Durham University, Diane Watt, University of Surrey
  • Book:
    Women and Medieval Literary Culture
    Published online:
    28 July 2023
    Print publication:
    17 August 2023, pp 269-284

  • Summary

    Liz Herbert McAvoyߣs essay on women visionaries highlights the importance of community in relation to womenߣs literary culture, in particular textual community. McAvoy adopts Karen Baradߣs terminology of dynamic intra-actions to describe the lives and writings of visionaries in the European high and later Middle Ages, taking as her starting point the complex and manifold spiritual female entanglements across space and time that are described in The Book of Margery Kempe. McAvoy traces such intra-actions back through Mechthild of Hackeborn and the nuns of Helfta in the thirteenth century to Hildegard of Bingen in the eleventh, and forwards to the later fourteenth century and Julian of Norwich. McAvoy also identifies the influence of Mechthild on A Revelation of Purgatory, written in the early fifteenth century by an anchoress of Winchester, and on the writings of Birgitta of Sweden, with which Kempe was familiar. McAvoy concludes that these interwoven spiritual connections between women are mirrored in knotted patterns of manuscript patronage and ownership.