Böcker av Diane Watt

The remarkable story of Margaret Paston, whose letters form the most extensive collection of personal writings by a medieval English woman.Drawing on what is the largest archive of medieval correspondence relating to a single family in the UK, God''s Own Gentlewoman explores what everyday life was like during the turbulent decades at the height of the Wars of the Roses. From political conflicts and familial in-fighting; forbidden love affairs and clandestine marriages; bloody battles and sieges; fear of plague and sudden death; friendships and animosity; childbirth and child mortality, Margaret''s letters provide us with unparalleled insight into all aspects of life in late medieval England.Diane Watt is a world expert on medieval women''s writing, and God''s Own Gentlewoman explores how Margaret''s personal archive provides an insight into her activities, experiences, emotions and relationships and the life of a medieval woman who was at times absorbed by the mundane and domestic, but who also found herself caught up in the most extraordinary situations and events.

Diane Watt sets aside the conventional hiatus between the medieval and early modern periods in her study of women's prophecy, following the female experience from medieval sainthood to radical Protestantism. The English women prophets and visionaries whose voices are recovered here all lived between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries and claimed, through the medium of trances and eucharistic piety, to speak for God. They include Margery Kempe and the medieval visionaries, Elizabeth Barton (the Holy Maid of Kent), the Reformation martyr Anne Askew and other godly women described in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and Lady Eleanor Davies as an example of a woman prophet of the Civil War. The strategies women devised to be heard and read are exposed, showing that through prophecy they were often able to intervene in the religious and political discourse of their times: the role of God's secretary gave them the opportunity to act and speak autonomously and publicly.Winner of Foster Watson Memorial Gift for 1998.

The Paston letters viewed in the context of medieval women's writing and medieval letter writing.

An exploration of the relations between medical and religious discourse and practice in medieval culture, focussing on how they are affected by gender.

This volume focuses on women's literary history in Britain between 700 and 1500. It brings to the fore a wide range of women's literary activity undertaken in Latin, Welsh and Anglo-Norman alongside that of the English vernacular, demanding a rethinking of the traditions of literary history, and ultimately the concept of 'writing' itself.

Gower wrote his vernacular poem Confessio Amantis at the same time as Chaucer embarked on The Canterbury Tales . It is therefore not overly surprising that Gower's poem is far less known today than Chaucer's. This study seeks to reinstate Confessio Amantis to its rightful place in the history of English literature by examining its ethics.