Women’s Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Women's Writing, ed. with Diane Watt. Special issue of The Chaucer Review. Contains co-written Introduction by McAvoy and Watt (pp. 3-10) and journal article written solely by McAvoy: ‘”O der lady, be my help”: Women’s Visionary Writing and the Devotional Literary Canon' (pp. 68-87).
- Submitting institution
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Swansea University / Prifysgol Abertawe
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 22702
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Penn State University Press
- ISBN
- 0000000000
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This co-compiled and co-edited Special Issue reflects research undertaken by myself and members of the Leverhulme-funded Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon research network between 2015-17. With Diane Watt, who led the network, I was responsible for overseeing the development of original network discussion papers into fully-articulated journal articles, helping to shape the volume in terms of coherence and teleology, working closely with contributors as they developed their drafts and added further research findings. I also developed my own original research contribution on the concerted and widespread influence of the thirteenth-century Germany nun, Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), on the writing of both women and men in England well into the fifteenth century, including demonstrating its incursion into a range of male-authored works not normally read in terms of female literary influence.
My research contribution to the Introduction, shared equally with Watt, necessitated detailed research to produce the paradigm-shifting view of medieval women as involved at all levels of literary production and, therefore, as fundamental to a literary history that has generally been identified as largely male: women were authors and readers, recipients and donors, patrons and editors, dictators and compilers, translators and interpreters, scribes and copiers – and often major contributors to the development of the canon. My contribution also necessitated research into the conception and production of canonicity, particularly during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, identifying how women’s writing has traditionally been misrepresented, misunderstood, ignored or elided from literary history – even within feminist milieux. Together with Watt, I forged the premise – and secured the evidence to suggest – that women’s literary culture in the Middle Ages was a collaborative one, both in insular and wider European contexts, wholly dispelling contemporary notions of authorship as a traditionally lone – and historically male – ‘esoteric’ activity.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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