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This is one of the first anthologies devoted to the writings of women in the Middle Ages. The fifteen women whose works are represented span seven centuries, eight languages, and ten regions or nationalities. Many are recognized, taught, and anthologized in their own countries but have been inaccessible to students in English. Others are little read today because their literary fortunes have paralleled fluctuations in literary taste and literary patronage. Katharina M. Wilson's introduction to the volume places these writers in historical context and explores the question of the female imagination and who these women were who were writing at a time when very few women were literate and most literature, sacred and secular, was penned by men. Each of the fifteen chapters has been written by a different scholar and includes a biographical and critical introduction to the writer, a representative selection of her works in translation, and a bibliography.
The distrust and hatred of matrimony is a recurring theme in Western literature. In this volume, Wilson and Makowski show that in their repeated imagery, continuous themes, and rhetorical devices, misogamous texts closely parallel and reflect economic and demographic shifts, and theological and legal innovation. Analysis of the literature demonstrates a link between the growing secularism and careerism of the late middle ages and the reduction of womens social status and public options.
The dawn of humanism in the Renaissance presented privileged women with great opportunities for personal and intellectual growth. Sexual and social roles still determined the extent to which a woman could pursue education and intellectual accomplishment, but it was possible through the composition of poetry or prose to temporarily offset hierarchies of gender, to become equal to men in the act of creation. Edited by Katharina M. Wilson, this anthology introduces the works of twenty-five women writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, among them Marie Dentière, a Swiss evangelical reformer whose writings were so successful they were banned during her lifetime; Gaspara Stampa, a cultivated ...
Selection of the works of Hrotsvit, the first-known woman dramatist, containing legends, dramas, and epics. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (c.935 - c.975), almost certainly of noble Saxon parentage, was a canoness of the Saxon imperial abbey of Gandersheim, living and working there during its time of greatest material prosperity and cultural and intellectual pre-eminence. Her importance cannot be overestimated: she is the first poet of Saxony; the first known dramatist of Christianity (indeed the first known woman dramatist of any time); and a woman displaying erudition and wit in an essentially patriarchal age, a female author in a literary field dominated by men who insisted on re-evaluating and redrawing the literary depiction of women. Discovered in the late fifteenth century, her extraordinary oeuvre, written in medieval Latin, comprises a wide variety of genres: eight legends, six dramas, and two epics, organised into three books. The present volume contains a selection of Hrotsvit's works in Englishtranslation, together with an interpretative essay, critical introduction, and scholarly apparatus. Professor KATHARINA WILSONteaches at the University of Georgia.
A valuable survey and reference resource It is hard to imagine a more needed and more useful literary reference work than this one, which gives students and readers quick access to the lives and work of a wide range of notable female writers from England and the Continent, from Aphra Behn to Emily Bronte, from Simone de Beauvoir to Isak Dinesen, from Bridget of Sweden to Hannah Arendt. Writers in more than 30 languages are included: French, Czech, Greek, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Serbian, Catalan, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovak, and more. Covers 1,500 years and all major genres Going back 15 centuries, the Encyclopedia covers the authors of n...
Selection of the works of Hrotsvit, the first-known woman dramatist, containing legends, dramas, and epics. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (c.935 - c.975), almost certainly of noble Saxon parentage, was a canoness of the Saxon imperial abbey of Gandersheim, living and working there during its time of greatest material prosperity and cultural and intellectual pre-eminence. Her importance cannot be overestimated: she is the first poet of Saxony; the first known dramatist of Christianity (indeed the first known woman dramatist of any time); and a woman displaying erudition and wit in an essentially patriarchal age, a female author in a literary field dominated by men who insisted on re-evaluating and redrawing the literary depiction of women. Discovered in the late fifteenth century, her extraordinary oeuvre, written in medieval Latin, comprises a wide variety of genres: eight legends, six dramas, and two epics, organised into three books. The present volume contains a selection of Hrotsvit's works in Englishtranslation, together with an interpretative essay, critical introduction, and scholarly apparatus. Professor KATHARINA WILSONteaches at the University of Georgia.
Hrotsvit's keen awareness of contemporary issues and her determination to provide her readers with a rich variety of exemplary female heroes and acts of personal courage, offer twenty-first-century readers a powerful model of responsibility and agency.
This is one of the first anthologies devoted to the writings of women in the Middle Ages. The fifteen women whose works are represented span seven centuries, eight languages, and ten regions or nationalities. Many are recognized, taught, and anthologized in their own countries but have been inaccessible to students in English. Others are little read today because their literary fortunes have paralleled fluctuations in literary taste and literary patronage. Katharina M. Wilson's introduction to the volume places these writers in historical context and explores the question of the female imagination and who these women were who were writing at a time when very few women were literate and most literature, sacred and secular, was penned by men. Each of the fifteen chapters has been written by a different scholar and includes a biographical and critical introduction to the writer, a representative selection of her works in translation, and a bibliography.