This essay explores the unique insights into the lives and book ownership of the Paston family offered by its fifteenth-century correspondence. It looks at three Paston women ߝ Agnes Berry Paston, her daughter-in-law Margaret Mautby Paston, and Margaretߣs daughter Elizabeth Paston (Yelverton) ߝ and the books that were in their possession or that they may have read. Putting the evidence concerning book ownership provided by wills, for example, alongside that of letters provides intriguing insights into the spirituality and influence of women, and the value they placed on devotional and moral works. The Paston womenߣs reading also included secular romance, the interest of which may have been as much political as personal. The reading interests of such women, then, extended far beyond the narrowly domestic.

The introduction explores womenߣs authorship and addresses the range of works by or attributed to women that were in circulation in England in the Middle Ages in the context of their contributions to a multilingual and inclusive literary culture. It examines the importance of collaboration, arguing that womenߣs writings may be collaborative in different ways: through amanuenses, through translation and adaptation, and through their historical and literary relationships with the men who write their lives. It explores other collaborative aspects of womenߣs literary culture, including womenߣs contributions as patrons, scribes, readers, and subjects of texts. It considers the importance of womenߣs religious communities, as well as the ways in which devotional books were owned by women and exchanged between nuns and by lay women, and it considers the active engagement of women with secular writing as owners and commissioners of books as well as writers. It argues that English womenߣs networks extend from Britain to the Continent and beyond.

This volume had its origins in the conference ‘Speaking Internationally: Women's Literary Culture and the Canon in the Global Middle Ages’, hosted by Bangor University in June 2019. The conference itself followed on from the Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval English Canon international network, funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2015 to 2017. Liz Herbert McAvoy, Sue Niebrzydowski and I were joined in the original network by five other project partners: Amy Appleford, Laura Saetveit Miles, Denis Renevey, Corinne Saunders and Nancy Bradley Warren. Together we set out to challenge both the exclusion of much medieval women's writing from the English literary canon and the idea that medieval women's literary history represents a tradition distinct from that of men. In this context, women's literary culture was defined broadly to include not only women's writing, but also women's roles as patrons, readers, and subjects of texts. The network sought to explore whether Chaucer, his contemporaries, predecessors, and successors had more in common with women's literary culture than had previously been assumed.

The network held two workshops during the first two years of its funded period: the first was hosted at Chawton House Library, Hampshire; the second at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, Boston University, USA. One issue that emerged from these initial meetings was that the focus on the English canon was too restrictive, and that medieval English literary culture could not be artificially separated from continental European traditions. To address this, the geographical scope of the literature under scrutiny was extended for the final network event: an international conference at the University of Bergen, Norway, which attracted over 60 delegates attending from around the world, including Canada, the USA, continental Europe, the Middle East and South-East Asia.

However, even with this wider geographical range, the network partners became increasingly aware of the limitations of our approach. We recognised the urgency of critiquing the very idea of a literary canon and of looking beyond the borders of our existing knowledge, our intellectual comfort zones. As Ankhi Mukherjee observes in her 2013 study, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon: ‘The canon has historically been a nexus of power and knowledge that reinforces hierarchies and the vested interests of select institutions, excluding the interests and accomplishments of minorities, popular and demotic culture, or non-European civilizations.’

The idea of Christ the Physician was widespread in the Middle Ages because cure of the soul was seen as an essential aspect of medical care. Yet for women in particular, the Virgin Mary seems to have had associations with medicine that went beyond her more generally recognised associations with intercessory healing and with childbirth. One of the defining and distinctive qualities of women's visions in the post-Conquest period is the increasing importance of the role played by the Virgin Mary, and some of these visions illustrate vividly Mary's medical role. At the same time, the Virgin Mary was central to the everyday religious life of women in the late medieval household, and prayers to Mary and other forms of Marian devotion were connected not only to motherhood but also to healthcare more broadly. This essay explores the interaction of spiritual and physical health in writing by and about late medieval English women. It argues that the belief in Mary as Physician, in Mary as a doctor of medicine, in late medieval England was closely linked to, and indeed validated, the role of the woman as healer.

The importance of Christ the Physician is examined in Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa's study of the connections between health of the soul and health of the body in the writings of the two late medieval European women visionaries, Marie d’Oignies and Margery Kempe. As Yoshikawa explains:

Yoshikawa's primary focus is on the importance to late medieval female visionary experience of the belief in the ‘medicinal qualities of the Eucharist’. Nevertheless, at the same time, Yoshikawa also addresses the centrality to women's mystical writings of visions of and meditations on the Purification of the Virgin.

Women’s literary historiography

Literary histories of English women’s writing have, traditionally, had little time for the early medieval period. Early medieval women are excluded from teleologies that celebrate the emergence of authorship and literature, understood in specific and restrictive terms, and that only acknowledge certain narrowly defined forms of textual production. They are omitted from linear temporal paradigms that already struggle to accommodate the vernacular visionary writings of the later medieval period and the devout poetry of the Renaissance, but which incorporate far more easily the dramatic texts of the seventeenth century and the prose writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth. One example of such an exclusive literary history is The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, now in its third edition (2007).