from Medieval Academy News

Where Are Medieval Women in Literary Historical Survey Courses?
by Gina Brandolino

Before I question the whereabouts of medieval women, it seems appropriate to disclose my own location. I am a graduate student in English, specializing in medieval literature; I have six years of teaching experience, a mixture of teaching my own courses and assisting in others’ courses. This article grows out of my experiences at this intersection—as a fledgling medieval scholar and teacher of English—and my experiences in learning how my work in these two capacities fits together.

In the Spring of 2001, I was the teaching assistant for “Women and Literature,” an undergraduate course taught by Susan Gubar. This course was described in the syllabus as a survey of “literary achievements in English over three centuries,” the eighteenth through the twentieth.  The required text,  The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, edited by Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, contains a section entitled “Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance” which includes writers who predate the eighteenth century. The course made use of this section of the book for one class meeting; the reading students were to do for this meeting included excerpts from Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe as well as the texts of four seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers. One of the questions guiding class discussion that day was, “Did women have a Middle Ages?”

I was able to gauge the student response to this question when I graded the first paper for the course. What I found was that students assumed women’s literary history is complicated and interesting not during, but after the Middle Ages. Another assumption students made often and easily was that, prior to Julian and Margery, women were not only not writing at all, in any language, but also were not intellectual at all, and further were completely dependent upon men. The Julian described in these papers was barely recognizable: A religious radical who, despite low self-esteem (remember, Julian describes herself as “a woman, weak and frail”), actively fought “the patriarchy” with her “controversial” “Jesus as Mother” theology. No one attempted to write about Margery, I assume because if Julian looked like a firebrand to them, they had no idea what to make of Margery.

Grading these papers, I realized that students had come to understand women’s literary history based on an idea of linear progress, and to understand medieval women writers as the rude beginnings of that history. This is, of course, not surprising; the Middle Ages are often variously construed to allow for the definition or development of other eras or concepts. More plainly put, the Middle Ages are often constructed as context rather than understood in their own context. The students whose work I was grading learned to understand medieval women writers as little more than context for later women writers and, having done so, never thought about them again. When it came time to write final papers on any author studied in the course, not one of seventy students returned to Julian or Margery. What I learned in this course, then, is that medieval women writers do more of a service to the canon of women’s writing in English than the canon does them; in the interests of constructing a progressive history of “the woman writer,” they are separated, fetishized, and ultimately forgotten.

I mention my experiences as Gubar’s assistant not to suggest that she is single-handedly responsible for the representation—indeed misrepresentation—of medieval women writers in the canon. On the contrary, Gubar, with Sandra Gilbert, has been instrumental in changing the way the academy approaches women’s writing in general—a significant accomplishment. Now we have the luxury of being able to supplement her substantial contribution to feminist studies, to fill in the gaps that the breadth of her work necessarily left.

Accordingly, I would like to suggest a few strategies for conveying the complexity of medieval women’s writing and intellectual history. I am not, of course, the first to point out the canon’s reductionist tendencies as it concerns medieval women; scholarship abounds on the way the canon and scholars of later periods misrepresent or ignore them. I hope my comments here can contribute to this discussion by bringing pedagogical concerns to the fore.

To that end, I want to suggest a few teaching strategies that could help medieval women find their way to a more accurate and visible place in literary historical survey courses. It could indeed be argued that I am preaching to the choir; however, the issue is not how enlightened medievalists are, but rather, how successfully we are enlightening and inspiring our students. The literary historical significance of medieval women is second nature to us, knowledge we might take for granted in our own classrooms. My suggestions are attuned precisely to that possibility, and while they apply most directly to teachers of literary historical survey courses or literature courses in general, insofar as medievalists of all fields are by necessity interdisciplinary, they may apply more widely.

The importance of interdisciplinarity in medieval studies is central to my first suggestion. As medievalists, we are uniquely situated to use our interdisciplinary knowledge to help our students understand the “bigger picture” of the Middle Ages; we should use it to give students a broader view of women’s intellectual, social, and literary history. Had the students whose papers I graded been familiar with the femme sole, brewsters and other tradeswomen, and female heretics, for instance, they would have at least had to qualify their assumption that medieval women were not intellectual—and in so doing learned something valuable about both the Middle Ages and the history of women.

Interdisciplinary teaching can also help students understand the need to be flexible with terminology. “Writer” is not a term that strictly describes Margery Kempe, yet she is indeed an author—is even cited by anthologists and textbook editors as the beginning of a literary timeline. What other women “writers” of the Middle Ages are there whose contributions to literary history are being overlooked because they do not fit the terminology? Encouraging students to think about what kind of authorial positions other than “writer” medieval women held can alter the way they think about the evolution of the woman writer—and can reveal Julian and Margery to be not two renegades who brought women out of silence, but members of women’s intellectual and literary traditions that did not begin with them.

My second suggestion is that we be mindful of what we teach: if our students conclude that medieval women are freakish or do not fit into familiar literary traditions, one reason could be the way the excerpts we choose to teach characterize them. In her book Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History 1380–1589, Jennifer Summit discusses how misrepresentative Henry Pepwell’s 1521 edition of The Book of Margery Kempe is of the entire text as we now know it; Pepwell included only the most subdued passages, identified Margery as an anchoress, and in general turned an expansive narrative into an introspective devotional text. Summit suggests that this same sort of misrepresentation occurs when excerpts of Kempe’s work are anthologized; The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women focuses on Margery’s obsessive concern with sex, while The Norton Anthology of English Literature emphasizes the mercantile aspects of her life.

Students will learn the lessons we teach them; if our reading selections pigeonhole medieval women writers, so will our students. “Sexy Margery” or “capitalist Margery” may seem the more interesting lesson plans, but selections more representative of the entire text will allow students a better understanding of Margery and her place in literary history. This is a lesson that we medievalists learned for ourselves in 1934 when the complete manuscript of Margery Kempe’s book was rediscovered—what an inadequate picture we had drawn of Margery based on the excerpts we had been given by Pepwell!

This is not to say that our lessons should be dull. My final suggestion is that we pay attention not just to how accurate our lessons are, but also to how interesting. In the course in which I assisted, I was glued to my seat during the sessions we discussed Jane Eyre, and the students, I gathered, felt the same way: no fewer than a dozen of them chose to write their final papers on Jane Eyre. Medieval women writers, however, had been abandoned—acknowledged by students but really not enjoyed by them it seemed. But while it is important to earn the attention of all students, I see it as especially important that our lessons appeal to the teachers-in-training among our students as ones they want to emulate in their own classrooms, and that we create assignments that encourage these students to think about the ways they might teach medieval women. Thus our lessons will extend beyond our own classrooms, making any time spent thinking pedagogically about the representation of medieval women in historical surveys a wise investment indeed.

Editor’s note: Gina Brandolino gave this talk in May 2002 in a session on Where We Are Now: Professional Issues, at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University.