God's teachers: Women writers, didacticism, and vernacular religious texts in the later Middle Ages

Abstract

During the Middle Ages, women were restricted from most formal teaching roles, particularly due to their exclusion from the all-male universities and cathedral schools flourishing across Europe. Despite these institutional and cultural restrictions, women found opportunities to take part in the transmission of knowledge: women often taught their children informally at home, took part in the education available in convents, and developed communities in which they shared texts among themselves.

A number of extant medieval texts feature women who adopt teaching roles, although this aspect of these texts has not received close scholarly attention. My dissertation, "God's Teachers: Women Writers, Didacticism, and Vernacular Religious Texts in the Later Middle Ages," examines a selection of these texts written by the medieval women writers Clemence of Barking, Marguerite Porete, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. My project focuses generally on how these women used their texts to transmit knowledge to their audiences. Specifically, my research examines how these women writers engaged their readers with their texts. In each of the texts by these medieval women there is a significant didactic, or instructive, element that encourages—and even requires—its readers to actively engage with the text in order to acquire the knowledge it contains. My other primary interest is to examine how female writers claimed authority by positioning themselves as transmitters of knowledge that would benefit their readers. My analysis of these texts reveals that the women writers adopted a number of strategies which enabled them to fashion themselves as authoritative transmitters of knowledge in spite of their gender.

I have chosen to focus on texts written in the vernacular, or the writer's native language, because women became increasingly involved in the vernacular literary culture that began to flourish in Europe in the twelfth century. Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate medieval women as readers and writers who were more engaged with texts written in the vernacular than those written in Latin—the language in which the vast majority of literary texts had previously been written but that was predominantly confined to the male learned elite. In these studies, scholars have investigated the socio-historical context of women's engagement with literate culture, thus expanding our understanding of women's education and literacy during the Middle Ages. My project builds on this scholarship by examining how women writers perceived themselves within this burgeoning culture and how they negotiated their positions as authors within that culture. My project also focuses on religious literature because religious women often had more access to education and literate practices than laywomen and were therefore more likely to leave their own written accounts.

The historical approach of my project allows me to examine how the texts reflect—or differ from—the literary traditions of which they are a part, and to consider what they reveal about the similarities and differences of authorizing strategies between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. I have also adopted a comparative approach, which allows me to consider how certain authorizing strategies were used by women writers from different cultures. Therefore, in addition to texts written by medieval English women in the English vernacular, I am examining a text by an English nun who was writing from within the Anglo-Norman culture that greatly influenced literature in England for a century and a half after the Norman Conquest in 1066, as well as a text written by a woman on the continent in her French vernacular that was later circulated in translation in England.

Throughout my dissertation, I argue that these female-authored texts depict women as authoritative transmitters of knowledge who are driven by didactic purposes. This didacticism has been largely overlooked in scholarship, despite the fundamental importance of this didacticism to the texts. My project thus addresses significant gaps in our understanding of women's active participation in the literary and intellectual history of the Middle Ages in spite of the institutional and cultural restrictions that limited their involvement in these aspects of medieval culture.