Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community

[An] admirable collection. . For anyone interested in what Wogan-Browne calls ＂the historiography of female community＂, nuns’ libraries and literacy, and Barking abbey itself, this first-class collection of essays is essential reading. CATHOLIC HISTORICAL REVIEW

Essays on the texts produced at Barking Abbey - one of the most important centres for writings in the Middle Ages.

Barking Abbey (founded c. 666) is hugely significant for those studying the literary production by and patronage of medieval women. It had one of the largest libraries of any English nunnery, and a history of women’s education from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Dissolution; it was also the home of women writers of Latin and Anglo-Norman works, as well as of many Middle English manuscript books.
The essays in this volume map its literary history, offering a wide-ranging examination of its liturgical, historio-hagiographical, devotional, doctrinal, and administrative texts, with a particular focus on the important hagiographies produced there during the twelfth century. It thusmakes a major contribution to the literary and cultural history of medieval England and a rich resource for the teaching of women’s texts.

Professor JENNIFER N. BROWN teaches at Marymount Manhattan College; Professor DONNA ALFANO BUSSELL teaches at University of Illinois-Springfield.

Contributors: Diane Auslander, Alexandra Barratt, Emma Bérat, Jennifer N. Brown, Donna A. Bussell, Thelma Fenster, Stephanie Hollis, Thomas O’Donnell, Delbert Russell, Jill Stevenson, Kay Slocum, Lisa Weston, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Anne B. Yardley