Some time ago, while proceeding to an episcopal convention… I received most pleasurably what had been written by your Grace to my humble self and, with my hands extended to the heavens, I took care joyously to extend immense thanks to God on behalf of your welfare. In your writing not only were the ecclesiastical compacts of [your] sworn vows – which you had pledged with a solemn promise – abundantly clear, but also the mellifluous studies of Holy Scriptures were manifest in the extremely subtle sequence of your discourse.^[1] 

Aldhelm’s prose style might seem a little ridiculous today, laden as it is with adjectives, but the key point is that he is evidently impressed by the nuns’ learning. Later on, he praises the ‘rich verbal eloquence and the innocent expression of sophistication’ which he finds in the letters. 

It would be wrong to think, however, that women were not copying texts in the medieval period. In around 735 – at about the same time that Aldhelm addressed his De Virginitate to Hildelith and her community – St Boniface (672x5?–754) wrote a letter to Eadburga, who was the abbess of Thanet. In the letter he requests: 

I beg you further to add to what you have done already by making a copy in gold of the Epistles of my master, St Paul the Apostle, to impress honour and reverence for the Sacred Scriptures visibly upon the carnally minded to whom I preach. I desire to have ever present before me the words of him who is my guide upon my road. I am sending by the priest Eoban the materials for your writing. 

It is clear that this manuscript was intended to be an important, high-status document and it is telling that Boniface requests that it be made in Eadburga’s scriptorium (the room where manuscripts were copied). The letter shows that not only did women possess the skills to copy texts, but that sometimes their work was prized. The British Library contains several early manuscripts which were copied by women, and others survive elsewhere. 

‘Just because I am a woman’: Women striving to be heard 

Clearly, however, women’s work was not usually valued enough to be preserved and widely disseminated. Some seven centuries after Aldhelm, in the late 14th-century, the anchoress and mystic, Julian of Norwich asked: 

Just because I am a woman, must I therefore believe that I must not tell you about the goodness of God, when I saw at the same time both his goodness and his wish that it should be known?^[2]

Should I also tell you whether a woman’s nature is clever and quick enough to learn speculative sciences as well as to discover them, and likewise the manual arts? I assure you that women are equally well-suited and skilled to carry them out and to put them to sophisticated use once they have learned them.^[3] 

One such mysterious voice is found in an anonymous Latin poem contained in a 12th-century manuscript (Add MS 24199). The poem seems to have been written by a woman – its penultimate line contains a word with a feminine ending, suggesting that the narrator is female. Of course, we cannot be sure that the author was also female, but the sentiments expressed in the poem read like those of a marginalised female writer. The narrator writes: 

No poems now please our leaders. 
I am indicted [formally charged with a crime], but in fact for what foregoing misdeed? 
If you want to know art is my crime, and genius. 
My lofty writing gave birth to my great crime. 
Clio – faithful companion, we are driven out, leave!^[4] 

The reference to Clio, the muse of history, is one of several learned classical allusions made by the author. Although we do not know who wrote this poem, it was clearly a well-educated person, perhaps a nun. Constant J Mews has suggested that the author may have been Héloïse, a 12th century French nun who had an ill-fated love affair with a philosopher and theologian named Peter Abelard. 

In the 1430s, she decided that she would like to record her experiences, but was unable to do so as she was illiterate. Instead, she wrote through dictation. She made at least four attempts to get what became her Book written down – three different male scribes were engaged at different times to transcribe her verbal account of her life. The work was finally completed in 1438. 

[1] Aldhelm, The Prose Works, ed. and trans. by Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 1979, repr. 2009), p. 59. 

[2] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (London: Penguin, 1998), p. xviii. This section is from the end of Chapter 6 in the ‘Short Text’. 

[3] Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. by E J Richards (New York: Persea Press, 1982), pp. 83–84. 

[4] Constant J Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Héloïse and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France (New York: Palgrave, 1999, repr. 2008), p. 165. 

[5] Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 35. 

Written by Mary Wellesley 

Dr Mary Wellesley is a British Library Research Affiliate. She did her undergraduate degree in English Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford before moving to University College London to pursue post-graduate research. Her doctoral thesis examined the manuscripts of the Life of Our Lady by the Benedictine monk and poet, John Lydgate (c. 1370–1450). 

She has published book chapters and articles on aspects of medieval literature and manuscript study, and co-edited Stasis in the Medieval West: Questioning Change and Continuity for Palgrave in 2017. Alongside her academic work, Mary also writes and reviews for non-academic publications. Her work has appeared in The Times and The Telegraph amongst others, and she is a regular contributor to The London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. She is writing a book about iconic manuscripts from medieval Britain, which is under contract with Quercus. In 2017 she worked as the writer and researcher for Discovering Literature: Medieval. 

The text in this article is available under the Creative Commons License. 

It is clear that women faced structural inequality which prevented their works from being copied and disseminated. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the survival of some of the most important female writers of the medieval period was ensured by the women who came after them. The earliest copies of the ‘Long Text’ of The Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich (1342–c. 1416) were created by exiled nuns in France and Belgium in the 17th century. The ‘Long Text’ was the culmination of 20 years of Julian’s revision and meditation on the visions which she experienced as she lay on her deathbed in 1373. Without the energies of these later female scribes, this vital text might have been lost. And, in the 20th century, it was a woman named Grace Warrack who produced the first modern edition of Julian’s works.